


In The Emperor's Service

by brigantines



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Biology, Alien Sex, Bad Ending, Blindfolds, Bondage, Brainwashing, Breeding Kink, Collars, Costume Kink, Dubious Consent, Gags, Harems, Hemipenes, Knotting, Leashes, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Milking, Mindbreak, Multi, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Nursing Kink, Pregnancy Kink, Pregnant Sex, Public Nudity, Public Sex, Restraints, Ritual Sex, Sex Addiction, Sex Toys, Sexual Slavery, Telepathic Sex, Tentacles, Vaginal Sex, Voyeurism, space opera politics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-08-28 01:27:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 35,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8425354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brigantines/pseuds/brigantines
Summary: Zarkon wins.  Everybody has sex.Also known as Pregnant Space Concubine Fetish: the Fic





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Kinkmeme, everybody 18+. PLEASE CHECK THE TAGS, this may be the filthiest most self-indulgent trash I've ever written, and I'm not kidding about everybody/everybody. Pairings and warning tags will change as chapters are finished. 
> 
> Also, everyone is pregnant.

***

Emperor Zarkon looked down with tolerant affection upon the straining, delicate body of his favorite concubine, still bouncing energetically in his lap despite having already been filled to the brim with seed from two previous rounds. The slave was panting softly from his exertions, slim hips rolling, and he had stretched up an arm to link around Zarkon’s neck, all the better to arch his spine attractively and display himself to the room at large, though he was only chasing his own pleasure.

Humans were quite insatiable creatures, the Emperor had come to learn, requiring only the slightest persuasion to abandon their principles and their sense of shame. A few gentle touches to the softest places on their soft bodies brought them to fever pitches of arousal, and they had no defenses against pheromones or any of the other natural mating enticements that so many other races produced. Zarkon had never before encountered another species so susceptible to simple, physical pleasure.

The great hall before them, echoing with the concubine’s soft, gasping cries and the wet noises of fucking, was not entirely empty: Zarkon’s personal guards lined the walls in their ceremonial armor, and Haggar’s masked Druids were arrayed in their usual places at the four corners. Others were due to arrive; the war council would soon be in session. The great war table that stretched half the room would see its seats filled with generals and commanders, adjutants and slaves and the usual hangers on of the Imperial court. Dozens of eyes would soon be upon them, jealous and interested and some outright hostile, and yet the human had climbed insistently in his lap as Zarkon lounged upon his throne, speaking quietly with two of his administrators, and deliberately slid clever, wicked fingers inside the Imperial robes of state to demand the Emperor’s attention. 

The administrators were too well-disciplined to give away any reaction to this impertinence, but their yellow eyes had been hungry on the human’s oiled, bare skin, dwelling on the high-necked collar he wore, studded with sapphires, the intricate painted designs on his flesh that both listed his honors and marked him as personal property of the Emperor, the sleek black and silver-buckled harness criss-crossing his body, emphasizing his lithe slenderness and also his budding pregnancy, a visible swell rounding out his belly. Proof of a fertile womb. His body was a statement and a challenge to every virile male that gazed upon him: a lush garden that wanted only plowing and seeding to ripen gorgeously. 

The administrators were such males. Under their hot gazes the slave had hesitated, or pretended to hesitate, the rhythmic movement of his hand under the robes faltering, until Zarkon murmured to him to spread his legs and display his delicately pierced sex to them, since he had been so willing to make a spectacle of himself. The slave no longer had the excuse of being in-season, drunk off quintessence and his new biological imperatives, when he had lusted wantonly after every male that caught his eye and presented for them, arching his back to display his willing, dripping cunt. The addictive quintessence he was fed every day kept his undeveloped human mind open and receptive to Zarkon’s will, and also ensured that life would spark inside him. It had been their slow, drawn-out nights of mating in the warm dark pools of the quintessence baths that finally impregnated the slave, but Zarkon enjoyed reminding him of his needy shamelessness. 

The human flushed dark, remembering the same thing, but complied immediately with his Emperor’s command. His small, sensitive cocklet stood helplessly at attention within its jeweled cage, for now still easily visible below his stomach’s growing bulge during the first stages of his pregnancy. Tiny pearls of sweet, milky liquid glimmered at the tip, although of course the Druids had seen to it that the slave’s body no longer produced its inferior and unnecessary genetic material. He was a breeding slave now, gifted with a breeder’s sex organs and all the pleasures that came with them. 

The original human phallus, already laughably small and delicate by Galra standards, had been further reduced in size to the useless, decorative organ it was now, firmly locked away and starved for contact within its lovely prison. Concubines were trained to crave penetration for their own release. 

The slave’s Druid-designed cunt was also flushed and swollen, dark rose-colored lips budding open at the slightest attention, unfurling shyly in hopes of a touch. The slave enjoyed being looked at. The slave enjoyed being shown off, and he was indeed a jewel worth displaying. Tiny round sapphires glittered against smooth, hairless skin in a beckoning trail of piercings down to where he glistened wetly between his thighs. 

The administrators did not overstep their bounds by leaning in but their nostrils blew wide, scenting. The slave smelled of quintessence and new life, of arousal, and such eagerness. Indeed, Zarkon found it seemed to excite all of his pets when they were forced to perform for an audience. Their minds protested, but their bodies soon told truer stories. 

The body of the Blue Paladin spoke now only of desire: his thighs were spread wide upon Zarkon’s lap without any false pretense at modesty, his eyes half-closed, his soft mouth parted, the slim brown fingers of his free hand dragging at his lips in pure self-absorbed pleasure. He had forgotten the room around them, the jealous watchers, the shame of being used so in front of his former enemies; the only thought in his head was how delicious it felt to have a thick cock moving deep inside of him, how he loved being made so full. He was all sensation. His growing belly bounced and swayed as he eagerly rode his master’s cock, reminding him how heavy it would soon become as his womb was filled again and again with seed, each time another chance to fertilize an additional egg and add to the litter nestled inside him. His nipples ached gently, wanting to be suckled in anticipation of his milk coming in. His small penis was throbbing in its cage, and with every bounce and shimmy he was grinding his swollen clitoris down against soft, smooth scales. 

He was a far cry from the terrified, defiant creature that had struggled against the guards at his capture, calling frantically for his lion and for his companions. Those had already accepted the authority of the true Black Paladin and remained frozen at Zarkon’s mental command; it took only a few gentle manipulations of the boy’s panicked mind to calm him, make him pliant. He had drowned under the weight of Zarkon’s psychic presence, his arms falling limply to his sides and his strange, human eyes welling with silent tears as the impulse to resist ebbed away, and he had stood quietly as the guards released him cautiously and were waved off. The lions obeyed their leader, and the Black Lion obeyed Zarkon. Without their strength shielding their pilots, the paladins needed no chains or restraints as Zarkon’s powerful, quintessence-amplified will smothered and subverted their own. He kept them obediently before him on the strength of a whim as he worked on each individual, wanting them to watch each other succumb. 

The Champion’s extensive conditioning with the Druids had taught them all a great deal about how vulnerable human minds were, how easy to confuse, how simple to tempt and seduce. It took hardly any craft at all to manipulate the parts of the human psyche that so desperately craved what Zarkon offered: power, certainty, an end to their doubt and shame and gnawing loneliness. 

Even as paladins these five were only barely connected, the fledgling bond between their hearts confounded by their own isolating emotions. They wanted one another, and convinced themselves they could not have what they wanted, and became upset over the not-having, all completely oblivious to the individual next to them also wanting. They had no natural psychic abilities, nor could they sense or smell sexual willingness. Zarkon had needed only to follow the existing, tangled threads of their tragic, uncommunicated attachments and their furtive, guilty fantasies to show them how simple it could be: all of their desires answered, all of their fears washed clean. 

In his own mind, the human boy was called _Lance;_ Zarkon washed that self-image away and replaced it with something more worthy, something the boy instinctively yearned for. _Chele,_ sapphire, a cherished jewel among Zarkon’s paladins. A strong, devoted warrior. A trained pilot, able to fully access his lion’s vast knowledge and experience under Zarkon’s personal tutelage. A respected, irreplaceable teammate, honored and beloved. The Blue Paladin represented hope and trust and their nature was of a kind that craved bonds. They matched themselves to their partners’ strengths, complementary. They tempered their opposite, the Red Paladin. They yielded and accommodated.

This Blue Paladin would yield to him. Zarkon needed his submission first, out of all the others. It was easy to remind the boy how tired he was of fighting, how he yearned to belong to a team that appreciated and valued him, how he wanted to stay with his friends and be warm and safe and protected. It was easy to tease out all the deeply held desires he’d thought hidden, locked away, and answer them one by one: his insecurities soothed, his flaws forgiven. 

Zarkon drew away his fears and filled him with certainty and confidence, whispered to him that he deserved his place at the Emperor’s side out of all the creatures in the universe, that he was special, that he had been made for this. Their natures called to each other with every cell, every atom, craving unity. The boy felt the truth of it inside him when Zarkon touched his fragile, smooth skin, traced the softness of his trembling mouth. He had been scared, but not enough to fight back. He knew it was not in Zarkon’s designs to hurt him. He was going to be… perfected.

Zarkon had lifted the jewelled chalice of refine quintessence to those lips and watched the human try to refuse, the blood-dark liquid spilling down his neck in rivulets, but in the end he’d choked down just the tiniest sip, and then suddenly his small, strange hands were laid over Zarkon’s on the cup, drinking deep, his throat working as he swallowed frantically. Quintessence moved through him like a flame, igniting every nerve, every sensitive place on his body lighting up hungrily. He wanted more. He wanted-- everything, he wanted all of it, he could _sense_ the quintessence that moved through Zarkon’s very veins after so many years of infusions, and went to his knees with pleasing eagerness. The close darkness of his mind had expanded, budding open like a flower to the sun. He wanted Zarkon’s energy-- the seed of the Black Paladin, his leader-partner-master-- he wanted to give and be given pleasure with all the furious craving of a newly born creature. 

The Emperor bade him wait, however, until the Red Paladin had been similarly seduced (an easier feat, with Chele kissing him softly, stroking him the way he liked in a sudden burst of connection, pressing small mouthfuls of quintessence to his lips until the Red Paladin was just as hungry for it, licking its sweetness out of Chele’s mouth), and then he had both of them on their knees before him, his sapphire and Riva, his ruby, together, kissing and touching each other in delirious, joyful exploration. He’d filled their soft, small mouths and their soft, small bellies with quintessence-laden seed, then and every day after, sating their gluttonous cravings. The Druids had quite a time keeping up with them during their extensive conditioning, as they were molded and reforged into the kind of paladins an Emperor required. 

It was not all so simple. They were young yet, for their species, and willful, their minds were not used to being open and their bodies were not used to being handled. Haggar had little tolerance for their tantrums, but Zarkon was patient. He had waited centuries for this, for young, emotional paladins with young, emotional hearts to sigh and shudder helplessly under his attentions, to welcome his mind and his body into theirs. Chele came to his bed not only willingly but enthusiastically; quintessence-drunk, revelling in the intense connection of the lion bond. 

Zarkon indulged him fondly. He too remembered discovering the giddy, delirious excitement of stretching out one’s thoughts to another mind and being welcomed, the easy shameless submission to a stronger, more confident will. At his core Chele was an anxious creature and he favored a strong touch in his mind, stroking and soothing away his fears. He enjoyed being commanded. He enjoyed being the sole focus of Zarkon’s attentions, and would delay every council meeting and every battle with his insatiable appetites if allowed. 

Including this one. “Quickly now, little one,” the Emperor murmured into the delicate shell of his slave’s ear, debating the need to augment the words with the lightest psychic stroke over the boy’s pleasure centers. Chele was not so mentally sensitive as Riva, who Zarkon could bring to trembling orgasm just from psychic pressure, but they were all growing more and more attuned to Zarkon’s presence and authority as the Black Paladin within the lion bond. Chele was especially responsive to approval, and rather than stimulate his senses psychically Zarkon placed a possessive hand on the hot, bare skin of the human’s swollen belly, distended with pregnancy. Chele had already given Zarkon one beautifully healthy litter while his self-proclaimed rival, Riva, still languished in the late stages of his first pregnancy. 

Haggar claimed that the daily infusions of refined quintessence and Druid experiments that altered their bodies to accommodate Zarkon’s young had yielded unpredictable results; Zarkon privately felt that the disparity between their breeding cycles had more to with Chele’s voracious sexual appetite. Riva was as violent and passionate and stubborn as his lion, like all Red Paladins; it pleased him to be angry and contrary where Chele was sweet and pliant. Chele dreamed of nursing kittens and nesting, of small, furry bodies clambering over him to reach his swollen breasts and kneading there, jostling and suckling urgently, of Zarkon’s fingers stroking his clit idly while Chele’s milk fed their babies. 

Riva still dreamed of fire and violence, and all his lovemaking had something of combat in it. He was never content to be pleasured, he wanted to be _claimed._ Zarkon mounted him after each of their sparring sessions, as it seemed to be what he expected; pressing his face into the polished floor of the dueling arena, holding him down easily, and fucking him lazily as he writhed and mewled for more. Competition excited him, as did servicing male organs with his mouth. He nursed a cock with the same single-minded intensity that he did anything, and Zarkon had gotten into the habit of rewarding his victories during training with pulses of psychic pleasure, keeping him hard and wet, and then commanding him to service his opponents while Zarkon’s touch in his mind gently brought him to orgasm after orgasm. 

Riva required the reinforcement, not being of a generous, forgiving nature like Chele, who needed hardly any encouragement while in the grip of passion to spread his lovely thighs for training opponents, for common guards in the halls, for other slaves, or even those belonging to hostile political factions. Chele’s enthusiastic addiction to pleasure was a minor diplomatic miracle, balancing out Riva’s touchiness.

Chele moaned brokenly at his pregnant belly being stroked, and the Emperor had only to press in gently to feel his children squirming busily inside their warm haven. The flood of thick come already warming Chele’s insides had fertilized another egg, Zarkon felt, a new kitten to add to the growing litter. Chele’s beautifully enhanced body would remain receptive to new seed up until the middle of his pregnancy, and the lingering quintessence in his master’s sperm made it especially potent. 

Zarkon passed his certainty of another kitten along, whispering it into Chele’s mind and pouring his satisfaction over another successful breeding like warm honey over Chele’s nerves. He sent the mental image of Chele’s gently rounded stomach growing even larger, swelling with life, his small, angular breasts becoming plump and tender as they filled with warm, sweet milk for the new litter. Chele’s hands moved unconsciously to his tits, massaging them as if in anticipation of the delicious ache of being suckled, and tipped over into shuddering orgasm as Zarkon cupped both hands on his full, soft belly, feeling its precious firm weight, tenderly proud of the mother of his young.

Chele sobbed aloud, soft and joyful as he basked in the knowledge that he’d pleased his beloved master, that his body was successfully nurturing Zarkon’s numerous children as well as any Galra breeder. His small cocklet began to spit untouched inside its jeweled cage and his warm, wet cunt rippled and fluttered beautifully, flexing and contracting around Zarkon’s secondary hemipenis, pressing deep into him as he came on its thick, studded girth. The primary hemipenis lay already spent along Zarkon’s thigh, glistening wet with evidence of Chele’s pleasures and well-milked, but twitching in sympathetic interest for its happy twin. 

The human slave slumped back limply against him, his thoughts a mindless haze of carnal bliss; Zarkon did not wait for him to recover but took his own pleasure, his cock writhing of its own accord inside that tight, lovely channel, massaging itself lazily. Chele squeezed and released around him, milking his master’s thick cock rhythmically, employing all the techniques he’d learned to pleasure the heavy knots of Zarkon’s favored commanders. 

He shuddered when Zarkon began to withdraw, inch after inch of studded, smooth-scaled cock teasing out of his throbbing cunt, and orgasmed again, helpless and whimpering, as the flared head rubbed against his over-stimulated clit. Zarkon shifted the human in his lap easily, cupping the back of his head and guiding it down, on the verge of climax himself. Chele, knowing it, took the time to tease: warm soft lips grazing the massive length of Zarkon’s hemipenis, cleaning away his own juices with a clever, mobile tongue and licking delicately at the weeping head, lapping up the steadily welling pearls of thick violet seed. 

There was no need for Zarkon to reprimand the stalling. The concubine soon grew greedy all on his own, addicted to the faint sweetness of quintessence he could taste on his tongue, and began to suck more urgently at Zarkon’s tip despite himself, hungry sounds mewling up from his throat. The conditioning he’d undergone had primed him to crave quintessence like this, wanting to nurse, wanting to drink long and deep like a kitten being fed. 

With its prehensile flexibility, Zarkon did not have to move his hips to slide his hemipenis past the slave’s soft lips, pushing deep into Chele’s waiting mouth and wriggling towards the back of his throat, nudging carefully against the soft tissue. Chele swallowed around him immediately, well-trained, his thoughts a flattering caress of _please, Master, please_ and a deep, instinctive desire to have his belly filled with warm, thick liquid. In mere moments Zarkon was emptying himself down the boy’s throat in strong, delicious pulses. Human climaxes were short, typical of hot-blooded creatures, with an eye towards quick couplings with multiple partners and the expectation of several orgasms with a dedicated mate bent on breeding; Zarkon’s sexual arousal was a slower, more patient process and its culmination stretched several minutes, hemipenes pumping seed continually in a steady river. It shocked new partners, but all the slaves were by now dedicated experts on the nuances of their masters’ alien bodies.

Chele sucked him eagerly through his climax, eyes half-lidded as he swallowed the steady, constant pulses of quintessence-laden seed. His small human hands massaged his heavy belly absently as he drank, fancifully imagining it growing larger with each swallow. The previous litter had been only three kittens; Zarkon felt there would be as many as four or five this time, given the promising size of the pregnancy bulge at such an early stage. Hardier Galra females could suckle eight or nine, and furtively Chele imagined himself giving birth to even more, up to an impossible dozen, surpassing all expectations and delighting their proud sire. Though his milk had yet to come in he imagined that full aching weight in his chest, desperate to be milked several times a day, how even a light touch or stray thought of nursing could cause him to leak through his clothes, when his master permitted him to wear any. During his last pregnancy his breasts had become so tender that Zarkon could bring him to climax just from teasing and fondling them, and he’d learned to come while being suckled. 

With both of them sated, and after Chele had licked both hemipenes thoroughly clean, unwilling to miss a single drop of quintessence, the Emperor allowed his concubine the indulgence of draping himself in his lap. Chele’s beautiful, slender brown back with its criss-cross of harness and painted symbols was presented to the room at large as he deliberately pressed his round stomach against Zarkon’s smooth belly scales, reveling in the contrast, and coaxed him into kisses, accepting the Emperor’s long reptilian tongue down his throat as easily as he had taken Zarkon’s hemipenis. 

They were now observed; the admirals and commanders had begun filing in to take places at the war table, a number of their own personal slaves or concubines with them, and a certain atmosphere of jealousy hovered. Chele and Riva both were occasionally loaned out to favored warriors who had distinguished themselves, and a handful of the commanders looked with faint wistful remembrance at the human’s soft mouth and clever, curious fingers. None were so highly honored as to be permitted to get a litter on Chele, constrained to spend their seed only into the paladin’s hungry mouth, filling his belly that way instead, but a select, lucky few had felt his Druid-designed cunt massage and warm their cocks for hours on end, or his tight, self-lubricating rear channel milk them relentlessly to the very last drop of come. 

An adjutant or two whispered quietly behind their hands, yellow eyes on Chele’s harnessed and painted body. They were not paying attention to their own commanders, nor to the other bejeweled concubines arranging themselves decoratively near their masters for the same purpose, to distract and entice. Chele outshone them all like a concentrated sun, radiant in pregnancy, besotted with his master. 

There were dissenting mutters that such decadence had no place at the war council. There were older commanders that had not been favored, or could not keep a concubine of their own, and looked with scorn or envy upon the Emperor’s personal stable of pets. The Paladins of Voltron, they whispered, would be better made into examples, imprisoned or slaughtered so they could not be used as symbols of lingering rebellion. The Emperor’s distraction over them was a detriment to the Empire, a reminder of former loyalties to his once beloved Altean king. The Emperor was, perhaps, _infatuated_ with these new Paladins, and with the idea of rebuilding the Voltron legacy. Had not Alfor of Altea been a God-King, supported by zealots and acolytes, ignoring the tensions of his citizens? Hadn’t he trusted too much in the power of his invincible divine weapon, and been defeated when he had lost control of that weapon in a battle of wills to his own champion, the Black Paladin? 

Zarkon let them whisper. Lower creatures could not understand the Paladin bond nor the absolute strength of will granted by quintessence. There was only one in this room who could truly challenge him, and it was neither his scheming son Lotor nor the mutinous cadre of generals that gathered around Prorok. 

She was herself just arrived; settling coolly into the throne that had been built for her beside his on the raised dais of the room: his sixmonth bride, Empress Allura of Altea.

*


	2. 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was written and re-written about a dozen times and I eventually got tired of fighting with it, so here it is. Unbeta'd, and inspired as always by cosu and some other beautifully filthy art on tumblr.

***

“Wife,” the Emperor greeted, neutral as any male could be with a pregnant concubine draped across his lap.

“Husband,” the Empress returned coolly. Her psychic presence in the room was the pressure of an impending storm, heavy and powerful; like Zarkon himself, she remained unaffected by the relentless wash of pleasure radiating from Chele, although she could sense it as surely as the other paladins could through the lion bond. 

The Imperial guards saluted their Empress with their weapons, accustomed by now to seeing her without guards of her own. The Druids nearest the throne remained silent and unmoving, expressing their disapproval. 

Allura had once again disdained dark Imperial colors and dressed herself in formal, ornate Altean armor over something that could only barely be called a gown: dozens of silky, floor length strips of fabric that swirled around her high boots and bare, muscled thighs. Not a court gown, but a silver and blue dueling dress in a style the universe had not seen for centuries. She went armed, as no others in this room were permitted to be, her bayard in its usual broadsword form, and her hair was tightly braided in a warrior’s style, set throughout with jewelled hairpins with tiny, dangling diamond chains that chimed softly as she moved. Gazes followed her, assessing. Concubines looked after her enviously, a chorus of soft, admiring sighs following her like ripples.

Only a fool would take her appearance as vanity. The dueling dress and armor were a challenge, a declaration that she considered herself only a heartbeat away from combat at any given moment. The deceptively delicate-looking hairpins that adorned her coiffure were nearly unbreakable and would punch through armor and bone with enough force put behind them. Zarkon had them crafted especially for her as a wedding gift, knowing as he offered up the bone-carved box housing them to her that he was handing over a weapon, an assassin’s tool, something she would not hesitate to use to kill him if ever the opportunity presented itself.

She had met his eyes over them and smiled beautifully, as deadly and radiant as her father had ever been at the height of his splendor. She was more beautiful, in fact; Alfor had not come to his ascension amid such danger and crippling pressures. The war between their races had made of her a diamond, a peerless and shining blade tempered by hatred and adversity and despair. 

There was no creature in the universe that hated him more than she did, and no other more worthy of the place at his side.

“My guards tell me you killed another assassin this morning.” Zarkon held a small glass phial of refined quintessence to Chele’s lips, rewarding him for another successful conception with a burst of chemical euphoria. Chele licked eagerly at the sweet drops clinging to the glass, suckling from it and ignoring both the conversation over his head and Allura’s presence, his attention all for the drug. 

When he had finished with it he was coaxed down from the throne by two attendants to lounge on the cushions by Zarkon’s feet, his blindfold replaced and the soft leather bit reaffixed for him to roll and champ between his teeth. The cuffs on his wrists were clipped to those on his thighs to prevent him from touching himself, and the delicate chains that attached to his pierced nipples and the jewelled ring in his swollen clitoris were strung to the tethering posts at his head and feet. Chele was caught between them but comfortably, lying on his back with his arms stretched down his sides, his prominent belly on display for wandering hands to stroke and rub. The arrangement was designed to encourage him to keep his pelvis slightly elevated, preventing precious seed from leaking out, but in this case he had already been successfully bred. Chele twitched his hips lazily against the gentle pull of the chains, comforted by the familiarity of the restraints, teasing himself while the quintessence spread through him. 

During his last pregnancy he had spent long hours bound like this, blindfolded and gagged while the hands of strangers caressed his belly, the entire court coming forward to pay respects to their Emperor’s unborn young squirming vigorously inside the distended stomach of a concubine, painted with Druid symbols. Chele had grown to crave the sensation of multiple unseen hands rubbing and pressing gently, counting the kittens inside him and reverently tracing the runes for a healthy birth upon his sensitive skin. 

It should have been Riva’s turn for such a display, although this council meeting was not a full assembly of the court, but unfortunately that was not possible. Ever contrary, Riva could barely allow Zarkon himself to handle his altered body without a strong psychic hold on his mind locking his muscles in place. It was not safe to enforce such a paralysis for long periods of time, especially during the last winding days of pregnancy, and so Riva had only been displayed for the court at intervals, brief appearances just long enough to provide proof of his swelling belly and his milk-heavy breasts. 

“I have killed a number of assassins. It seems pointless to report all of them.” Allura ran the clawed points of her armored gauntlet along the sturdy arm of the throne, pretending to ignore the goings on at her husband’s feet. She was coy with her own slaves, hoarding them possessively and preferring not to display them regularly to the prying eyes of the court, although that did not stop the ever-turning wheels of baseless rumor. “Your guards are very well-informed.”

“The Dreadnought is my flagship, my dear,” the Emperor replied. “Nothing happens aboard it that I do not know about.”

“Nothing, husband?” she asked innocently, as if she were not funneling resources to the Marmora traitors and half a dozen other rebel systems. There was nothing to link her to it, but guerilla attacks across multiple star systems had become better coordinated and well-armed, independent factions that had gone years without unified leadership abruptly choosing to set aside their differences. 

“If we are speaking of secrets, they will ask again today,” he reminded her patiently. 

“Perhaps today I will have something to show them.” She smiled, but it did not reach her eyes, and the sword bayard across her knees gleamed with a cold light. “I am ever so eager to bear the children of Zarkon Godbreaker, the Emperor of Lions, who brought low Alfor of Altea and liberated the galaxy from his tyrannical rule.”

“The council will be pleased to hear it.” He settled more comfortably in his throne, summoning another slave bearing refreshments and trailing a hand over the armrest to stroke Chele’s upturned face. “As I am pleased to hear that old enemies might put aside their differences for the sake of the future-- for the sake of our precious children.”

His trailing hand spread possessively over Chele’s round, soft belly. Allura’s mouth tightened.

“Your slave looks well,” she remarked, eyes glittering. “I would not have thought your Druids capable of properly caring for a human without amputation involved.” 

“I am told there is a learning curve.”

The bayard across Allura’s knees took on a brighter glow as a low, rumbling growl echoed inside of the lion bond. In its private hangar, Allura’s lion was awake and trembling with fury, its great jaws gaping wide. The other lions woke with it, unsettled and unhappy. Zarkon could feel the instability of the situation even as the Black Lion tried to establish dominance over its packmates, rumbling softly. 

The White Lion threw its head back and roared defiance. Allura’s hands clenched on the white bayard, struggling with the instinct to challenge. 

When Zarkon had reclaimed mastery over the Black Lion and its proxy pilot, who had only ever been a placeholder for Zarkon himself, his own quintessence coursing through Shiro’s body, he had been able to steal away two of Allura’s paladins and their lions, corrupting them through their ties in the lion bond. Shiro’s fragile will had always been destined to crumble on command, and when he fell the Red Paladin followed him, hopelessly ensnared by bonds of sentiment. 

That alone would have been a significant victory, though Zarkon already knew well that the Red Lion made a poor captive and would not bow to his will. But the Blue Paladin had been an unlooked for gift, the heart of the team’s loyalties caught between Black and Red and the remaining Yellow and Green lions. 

With his capture, with his surrender to Zarkon’s will, the fall of Voltron was made possible. It would have only been a matter of time before he could call the remaining paladins to his side, putting pressure on their bonds with each other. The Blue and Yellow Paladins were tied quite tightly together and thus easily manipulated, and the fierce resistance of the Green Paladin could have been slowly worn away through her ties to Shiro, his will entirely dominated by Zarkon’s, to the Blue Paladin, her former teammate, and to her twin brother, still in Galra hands. 

And yet this victory had also been a disadvantage. Zarkon had been forced to quit the battlefield and devote himself entirely to binding the Red and Blue Paladins to his service. Humans were wild, emotional creatures, powerful and fragile in their own unpredictability. It had taken a year for the Druids to break Shiro, and even he was not under perfect control at all times. He resisted and subverted, and he was stronger with even the small connection he had forged with the Black Lion. He obeyed because he was in love with obedience, had been conditioned to crave the ecstasy of surrender and submission, but he would follow any master strong enough to command him. 

In his determination to correct this mistake with his new prizes, Zarkon found himself unable to press any advantage in his victory. Instead he spent his days caring for his fledgling paladins as if they were fledglings in truth, soothing their terror and calming their wild impulses to violence. It would not do to lose his new pets to their own fear when he had only just acquired them.

He taught them to accept basic necessities from his hands and security from his proximity, his scent, his dominating influence in their minds, centering the groundwork of their conditioning on his presence. He fed them by hand, all of their food and drink laced with traces of quintessence until they could handle direct doses, loosened and tightened their restraints according to their obedience, dressed them in luxuries, combed their soft, silken manes and explored their soft, fragile bodies, learning what pleased them with inexorable dedication. He meted out gentle punishments not to the one who had behaved poorly but to the other, and to Shiro, and he rewarded their cooperation lavishly. They were brought to the milking couches daily and strapped into place until they learned not to fight, tossing their harnessed heads fitfully as their cocks were milked and emptied. It was important to establish a routine of pleasure, to teach them not to fear being handled and also to get them used to being offered pleasure by others. 

They quickly moved to requiring three or four milkings a day as Zarkon saw to their every need, coaxing them into the quintessence pools and into his bed without restraints. He trained them to relax at his voice, trained them to expect pleasure at his touch, smothered their fears with his confidence and encouraged them to explore each other. 

He watched their minds and bodies begin to open shyly to each other and to him, quickly becoming greedy and addicted, and gave simple commands that they secretly desired anyway, adding suction devices to their nipples and ordering them to nurse his hemipenes while undergoing their thrice daily servicing, training them to associate their orgasms with his presence and his authority. They shuddered and whimpered eagerly, crouched on all fours like stock animals on the milking couches as soft-handed concubines massaged their swollen balls and played gently with their winking holes, stretching them around small toys, and milked their strange human penises while they licked and suckled Zarkon’s twin cocks. A belly full of warm seed became a comfort to them. 

He had them watch Shiro’s eager obedience, Shiro’s willingness to fight or fuck on his Emperor’s command, and showed them Shiro’s jeweled cock cage before locking them into their own. They cried through their milking sessions afterwards, still put to the couches but now for prostate milking alone, their cocks trapped and useless inside the custom cages. Only then were they deemed ready for the hands of the Druids.

It was not a short process. Zarkon’s withdrawal from the field was noticed, and his retreat and subsequent distraction had given Allura and her alliance of resistance the deadly advantage of time. Searching desperately for some way to recover the situation, Allura had been handed a gift by her allies and their spy networks: a map and a key, and a legend of an ancient Altean weapon that had been sealed away before the fall of the Altean kingdom. The relics had been guarded by a succession of mystics, handed down generation after generation with a sacred charge of keeping them out of Galra hands. Allura had found them and passed their trials, and she brought out of the mists of history another lion, a massive, dangerous creature that had been forged as an equal and counterweight to the Black Lion and then sealed away when it would not accept control by a pilot. A contingency, apparently, for the very situation they now found themselves in.

For a united Voltron, the White Lion would have given the divine weapon even more power, all five of the lions bending their wills upon it to bring it under control. The White Lion was a feral monster, having eaten previous pilot candidates it deemed unworthy and absorbing their quintessence, but for a Voltron divided the White Lion was capable of replacing the Black Lion and giving Allura necessary dominance over the lesser lions. With the White Lion on her side, she no longer had to fear that the Black Lion would be able to sway her Green and Yellow in the midst of combat. 

They were then three and three, locked in stalemate, but Allura’s power was growing exponentially, already stronger at her age than Alfor had been, and the Red and Blue Paladins were still so very young and vulnerable. The Blue Paladin had only just gone through his first Galra heat, his altered body not yet settled enough to carry kittens but willing, so very willing, and desperate to be mated, and for the first time in many, many years Zarkon had feared that an opponent on the battlefield might destroy something dear and valuable to him. For all her veneer of royal compassion, Allura was no bleeding heart. She understood that paladins could be replaced. 

Perhaps it had been a mistake to send Shiro to assassinate her, back then. 

Chele moaned softly, interrupting; the quintessence he’d been given was thoroughly spread through his system now, expanding his consciousness and making him even more susceptible to psychic influence than he was normally. Zarkon and Allura were two rival powerhouses in close vicinity and Chele couldn’t help reacting to their tension, sending them conciliatory waves of his own pleasure as he teased himself and also plaintively begged through the lion bond to have his stomach caressed and massaged. The Blue Lion rumbled her displeasure at her fellows for disturbing her captain, and the White Lion subsided with a final snarl. 

Allura’s eyes went heavy-lidded despite herself. She dismissed her bayard and went to kneel down gracefully by Chele’s bound body, tipping his chin towards her, calling the slave softly by his discarded human name.

Chele nuzzled her fingertips without recognition, wriggling in pleasure at being touched and chewing at his bit. He arched his back invitingly as she stroked down his neck. 

She sighed, giving in and moving to rub the gentle swell of his belly with both hands, massaging it firmly but tenderly and sending him into a paroxysm of delight. His hips rolled and twisted more insistently, tugging gently at his pierced clit. Allura plucked expertly at the taut silver chains, strumming them with her fingers as Chele shivered and moaned and, quite suddenly, climaxed again, his little sex hiccuping creamy pearls of seed.

“He is quite insatiable,” Zarkon could not help observing fondly, enjoying the echoes of his slave’s pleasure. “I gave him permission to remain in his quarters for this meeting, but he insisted on accompanying me.”

“Certainly he did, with the Red Paladin so near his time and unstable.” Allura unbuckled one side of the bit carefully, removing it from Chele’s mouth so that he could speak, and laced a touch of power behind her words, commanding his attention. Zarkon graciously let go of his hold on the slave’s mind to allow his wife precedence.

“Lance, you mustn’t push yourself like this. It will not balance out Keith’s fertility issues or his reluctance, no matter how much you want to show him how it feels.” 

Chele’s voice was dreamy and slurred, half out of his mind from pleasure and the drugging effects of the quintessence. “But it-- it feels so good, it feels _so good,_ ’m so full, I can feel them moving inside me-- so many babies growing in me, pushing and moving, feel how full I am…”

“Yes, darling.” Allura bent to brush a kiss across his sweaty forehead as she deftly unhooked his restraints, glaring down the guards that looked twitchy as she handled the Emperor’s property. None of them were foolish enough to protest. 

“Would you like to come and sit by me?” she asked gently. “You can have your blindfold off, and you should have something to drink.”

“More,” Chele moaned, his small pink tongue curling out to lap at her fingers greedily as if he believed they might be coated in the quintessence he craved. “Please, more, it makes me feel so good.” He blinked muzzily up at her as she carefully removed the blindfold, his pupils still hugely dilated. He was obedient under her hands but uncoordinated, loose-limbed and vague from the drug. 

Allura beckoned two attendants over to assist her. The meeting had not yet been called to order, and there were still slaves and concubines milling about. “Raw quintessence is good for your babies, but you need more sustenance than that,” she lectured as Chele was cleaned up, folded into a clean robe, and settled into a plush gravity couch next to her that she might tend him personally. “You need food and water to make good milk, remember? I’ll have something brought over. Do you think you can eat a little for me?”

“Yes, mistress,” Chele responded automatically, his gaze wandering a bit before it finally seemed to latch onto her face. His brows knit together, recognition slow to come. “A-Allura?”

“I’m right here, darling.” 

“Where’s-- where is everybody, where’s...”

“Shh, shh, it’s all right.” Allura cupped his cheek gently. “You’re safe here, I promise.”

She did not choose to smother his mind with her will to make him calm and pliant, as Zarkon would have to soothe his slaves’ unnecessary emotions, so Chele turned his head away, anxious, fighting back the dizzy fog in his mind and reaching for his lion, combining the distress call of a paladin seeking support with a pregnant queen searching for her packmates. Breeding hormones did nothing for his psychic control, but the raw emotional need gave him the boost he needed to make himself heard through the lion bond. 

His call was answered immediately. All six lions pressed _calm_ and _safety_ back, united in their response to a pregnant paladin despite the uncomfortable realities of their situation. Elsewhere on the ship the Red Paladin lifted his head and snarled, hyper-sensitive and irritable due to his own pregnancy, annoyed at the presence of a rival queen in his territory. Red Paladins historically made poor nesting mates, discomfited by any kind of emotional onslaught, but Riva would come around by the time Chele was ready to give birth. He had been there the first time, alternately growling at Zarkon as a powerful male so close to vulnerable kittens and purring to comfort Chele, who in the throes of labor had rejected all of Zarkon’s mental controls and clung to his fellow humans as if they were mates. 

Riva had been enjoying a male, a hapless guard accosted in the hallway, before Chele’s call interrupted him. He sank into the lion bond furiously, looking for a target, and both Allura and Zarkon tensed to intervene, but fortunately the Yellow Paladin Halix was there already, driven into rut by the combined pregnancy hormones of two fertile queens and thoroughly distracting, reaching back for his packmates. 

Images and emotions flooded back to all of them: a dark, enclosed room, the snorting breaths of an aroused male, the familiar restraints of a milking couch. Halix was attended by veteran handlers with neutral scents who knew how to wrangle a rut-maddened male. A concubine lay waiting on the bench, a gleaming silver-blue Sileon, a shapeshifter species with flesh that resembled a thick, semi-transparent gelatin. Per instructions, xe had already molded xirself into a simulacrum of Chele, the effect made strange by the dim silhouettes of organs visible inside xir body, and xe was teasing the humanoid sex organs xe had shaped for xirself, adding that intoxicating scent of arousal to the room. 

Halix’s nostrils flared as he breathed deep, scenting, his muscles quivering. He wanted Chele and Riva, protective instincts urging him to find them and tear apart anything that got in his way, but there were energy tethers tugging him forward to the milking bench, and the smell of a fertile, receptive concubine was a powerful enticement. Chele had already been distracted from his distress and was interested in the Sileon’s simulacrum, the quintessence fogging his mind loosening any inhibitions or jealousy he might’ve otherwise had. Despite being Zarkon’s personal property, one or two of the kittens growing inside him likely belonged to Halix, and Chele wanted to see him mount something that looked like him. He wanted to feel Halix’s pleasure during milking, and in a faint echo so did Riva. 

The Sileon came forward to kiss Halix, coaxing. The handlers eased him into position, urging him forward with hands on his cock, on his thighs, stroking and petting him until he could be locked in. He was on all fours, collared, his weight supported by the struts of the bench, thighs spread wide and his fat, heavy cock hanging down, dark with arousal and already dripping. He had been gifted the studded cock of a Galra warrior by the Druids and the handlers worked it efficiently with gloved hands, milking him with long, steady pulls as they chattered to each other. 

The malleable, rubbery suction device was fitted snugly over the flushed, swollen crown of his cock as Halix grunted rhythmically, fucking the air, hips thrusting against the pull of the restraints. He had climaxed once already, his thick seed collected and drawn away through the tubes, but during rut he could expect to orgasm at least half a dozen times more. He continued to churn his hips into the loose, almost indifferent grip of his milker while the others toyed with his nipples and his heavy balls, cupping and rolling them, and rubbed their fingers around the place where a vibrating toy affixed to the rear of the milking couch was stretching him open. It had been custom made for his body, pulsing inside him in the pattern that he liked, and he rocked back and forth on it eagerly, moving between the toy and the grip on his cock. 

For a male in rut he was being remarkably well-behaved, but he still jerked his head against the ties in fitful intervals, losing his focus, rhythm faltering until he was coaxed back with fingers rubbing expertly against his perineum. Halix had not spent nearly as much time being conditioned on the bench as Riva and Chele had, having been acquired later, and he was anxious under restraints. 

The handlers praised him, stroking his straining flanks, and rewarded him by guiding his throbbing cock into a pseudo-flesh toy, wrapping it around him from the base of his penis nearly to the head. Halix fucked into it instinctively and the toy began to squeeze and release around him, simulating the feel of a live body accepting his cock. 

The Sileon concubine wearing Chele’s shape, no longer content to watch, moved around to the front of the milking couch where Halix’s face was, dragging xir cool fingers along his heated skin. Xe spread the swollen lips of xir cunt and pressed it to Halix’s mouth, and Halix went to work lapping at it, burying his face between the Sileon’s thighs. Chele shivered as if he could feel Halix’s eager tongue on him directly, flooding the lion bond with memories of their mating, and even Allura sighed deeply in appreciation. The Sileon moaned in a clotted, muffled voice, fingers burying themselves in Halix’s hair, and he came again, hips jerking, filling the suction tube with hot seed. The Sileon gestured for the attendants to remove the pseudo-flesh toy and unclip some of the restraints. Once they had done so, prompting a whine from Halix, the Sileon positioned xirself over the breeding bar, arching xir back and presenting as Halix moved forward to mount, his hands gripping the Sileon’s slender waist, muscles bunched eagerly, his cock already fattening up. He dragged the head of it over the simulacrum of Chele’s ass and pushed between the concubine’s thighs, smearing precome and seed, teasing himself back to full hardness. 

A helpless groan escaped him as he finally slid his throbbing cock into what felt like cool jelly, pressing in and in and in until he could feel his tip nudging something firm, and his rut-addled mind was delighted to look down and see himself through the Sileon’s body, pressed against the entrance of xir womb. There was no chance of damage or pain, no matter how enthusiastic a mating; Sileons were only vulnerable to extreme temperature changes.

Mobile flesh flowed along the length of Halix’s cock, shaping into hundreds of tiny wiggling cilia that teased him unmercifully. He grunted his pleasure, thrusting in short little bursts, watching in fascination as his cock was worked and squeezed. The toy inside his ass continued to pulsate but at a gentler setting, massaging his prostate delicately. The Sileon was moaning in earnest now, relishing the temperature change of something hot moving deep inside xir body as much as the delicious, driving friction. Halix was too worked up to last, shoving himself even deeper and groaning out a long, satisfied sigh as his cock pulsed, shooting thick spurts of come that were clearly visible inside the Sileon. He thrust a few more times, smearing the white, viscous cloud and watching it spread slowly into the concubine’s womb and edge nearer the marble-sized silvery eggs. 

By the time their session was finished the Sileon’s womb was completely full of white, xir eggs submerged in a sea of fertile semen, and there was also a large milky cloud spreading in xir translucent stomach as xe tenderly nursed Halix’s softening cock, now wearing the silhouette of Riva’s form. Halix lay sated on his back, legs spread wide and stroking the cool, strange curve of the Sileon’s head between his thighs, radiating contentment. 

The council was being called to order. Zarkon felt other stirrings in the lion bond but was forced to set that aside to concentrate on the first order of business, standing up to speak. Allura murmured something inaudible to Chele and removed herself to her throne, letting him pillow his head on her thigh instead as she stroked his hair and coaxed him to take small bites of delicacies from her fingers, patiently waiting out his quintessence high. Chele opened his mouth obediently for whatever she chose to feed him, chewed and swallowed, but mechanically, not tasting any of it, and his eyes remained glassy and distant. His hands cradled his full stomach, stroking it repetitively, lost in dreamy pleasure along with Halix. 

At the war table, petty arguments ranged back and forth. It was an unfortunate result of the military breeding program that so many soldiers, genetically selected for their aggressive personalities, could not be brought together for a council without snarling and snapping at each other, and their instinct-driven posturing only encouraged the lower ranks to do the same, forming cliques or lashing out on matters that might have little to do with an individual’s political leanings. Higher ranking officers sniffed out weakness and the faintest scents of sexual willingness, coaxing interested subordinates away from their assigned superiors or intimidating them into submission, and all council meetings were a chance for sexual politics to influence the proceedings. 

Alpha males and females enjoyed the attentions of slaves, trained concubines, or even their own beta officers and used them to maintain an emotional equilibrium in the midst of conflict-heavy situations where fighting could not be tolerated. Deft, stroking fingers and affectionate tongues hidden underneath the high table bolstered the authority of confident alphas, contributing to the subtle scent miasma that spoke as much about rank and power as did the number of bars on a uniform. It was also not uncommon for inexperienced or naturally weak-willed subordinates to become overwhelmed by the crowd of strong personalities and sink to their knees in an ecstasy of submission, nuzzling hopefully at the spread thighs of their commanders, or for subordinates to tease and pull rank on each other, leaning too close together, stroking unseen fingers along uniform seams. 

A handful of smug officers stroked possessive paws over the distended bellies of their companions, fat with pups or merely bulging with seed for appearance’s sake. Some were wives, some were slaves, some had only been purchased as a performance for this particular meeting. Concubines served refreshments or entertained each other on the lounging couches, hoping to attract admirers. A slender male Bellarion barely out of training silks sat ignored on the couch behind his master, Commander Prorok, eyes respectfully downcast but unhappiness radiating off the graceful lines of his body, his glowing tendrils drooping slightly. Prorok had no long-term contracts with the harem stables and preferred to rent a different companion for any event where he might find himself suffering a tick of boredom; the concubine would either find this a tedious occasion or use the time to display himself favorably to more interested parties. 

Most of the officers near Prorok wore belligerent or worried expressions, too busy glancing at their sullen commander’s glances to worry about a neglected concubine. Serving an outspoken master carried risks, and the chair next to Prorok was empty. The next seat down was occupied by Thace, looking harried, his head bowed over reports and an almost tangible bubble of long-suffering silence surrounding him. It was a good affectation; one could believe that he did not wish to be here, enduring the thankless burden of tidying Prorok’s affairs for him. His own concubine was a demure creature, more modest than the expensive beauty of a Bellarion and precisely the correct rank for the sake of appearances, dressed like many other of the concubines present in a passable imitation of Altean fashion.

“The guerilla attacks on our forces in the Errigat territory have ceased,” an adjutant reported nervously, gaze darting between his datapad and his general, who had not stopped glaring at Allura since her entrance. “The Errigati sent a messenger claiming that they will not quarrel with the Lion Goddess, but neither will they relinquish the two Balmera creatures they stole from Imperial airspace.”

“Outrageous!” A commander slammed his fists on the table, echoing the sentiments of several around him. “We should dispatch a fleet. Burn the rebels out of their asteroid fields, burn them out of existence!”

“They are still harvesting crystals,” said another officer, impatient. “If they will send a tithe to their ‘goddess,’ let the Errigati worry about staffing the mines and taking over the animal husbandry.” 

The glaring general pushed himself up from the table, his canines bared. “The Lion Goddess is a fictional symbol of the rebellion. Allura of Altea is the wife of our Emperor and nothing more, she has no authority that is not Imperial authority!”

“Tell that to the Errigati,” retorted the officer. “How many cycles have you spent trying to pacify that region, Vylick? The rebels managed to steal two weakened, sluggish Balmera out from under your nose without being caught, and now they’re willing to roll over for a bedtime story. If only all of our jobs could be done for us by superstition.”

General Vylick snarled, low and rumbling, his clawed fingers contracting and raking strips from the table, seeming on the verge of leaping for his opponent when a soft noise interrupted him; a faint exhalation of breath, a musical chime of glass. 

The delicate sound came from the elaborate, jewelled headdress of Niwe, widowed First Wife of the former Imperial Head of Intelligence and current mistress of his replacement, as she turned her head just slightly and sighed, a sound as deliberate and dangerous as the unsheathing of a sword. Her breath frosted in the air, and those not in her immediate entourage automatically leaned away from the invisible, deadly chill that radiated from her shining, diamond-scaled skin. 

“Honored soldiers of the Empire, do we not have more urgent concerns?” 

Vylick’s ears were flat against his skull. He made no answer but a final, silent snarl before reseating himself, dragging down the nearest concubine into his lap to soothe his ruffled temper. The concubine immediately went pliant against him, well-versed in the art of handling furious, dominant males, and slid an expert hand down below the ledge of the high table, moving rhythmically. 

The other officer involved in the argument looked disgruntled; he was too low ranked to have purchased attending slaves to keep his temper under control, but had the sense to lower his gaze submissively when Niwe glanced in his direction.

“Certainly our revered Empress cannot help that some violent agitators have chosen to find her person worthy of respect and admiration, and cast her in the image of their mythical goddess,” Niwe continued, her voice low and cool. She folded three of her arms and extended the fourth, a gesture of respect in the direction of the twin thrones. “One imagines they find it easier to save face in this fashion, than in continuing their futile assault upon the Empire.”

“It is an insult to claim they are honoring an Empress while defying Lord Zarkon,” another angry voice rumbled from further up the table, supported by a chorus of muttered agreements that faltered as soon as Niwe’s handmaidens turned their heads, memorizing names and faces.

The adjutant who had given the original report coughed hurriedly, punching up pages on his datapad to try and change the subject. “Ah, I am pleased to report that Galisvar has been pacified, and Dakir, and Vesenium--”

“Imperator Idrix has offered his hand in marriage to the Lion Goddess,” someone else interrupted. “His fleet holds the processing factory planets in the Inner Ring. He is claiming he will support an alliance with Altea, and that he will smash the Empire’s supply lines. He has known connections to the Marmora traitors.” 

Every eye turned to Allura, who only raised an eyebrow, the rhythm of her fingers stroking through Chele’s hair unbroken. “How inconvenient for the Imperator that I am already happily married. And I had assumed it was well known that Altea is no more.”

Another accusation rose from the ranks: “And if he offered to establish a new homeworld for Alteans?”

“There are no more Alteans,” Commander Prorok declared, incredulous. “This is absurdity. When the Empress has children they will be Galra, and heirs to the Galra Empire.” 

“How naive, Prorok,” drawled a voice from the hall entrance. “Surely you’ve figured out by now that Princess Allura’s marriage to my father is a sham.” 

Under Allura’s hand, Chele quivered.

Prince Lotor, current heir to the Galra Empire and Zarkon’s firstborn, lounged arrogantly against the wall, his formal armor gleaming. He had left behind his usual bevy of admirers, tittering concubines and court sycophants, and ignored the startled and scandalized looks from around the table with perfect ease. Lotor had a standing invitation to all meetings and war councils, no matter how little he exercised it; he did not often concern himself with the politics aboard the Dreadnought, preferring the relative independence of managing his own conquering fleet at the leading edge of Imperial territory.

Of course, it would be more unusual for him to remain so removed given recent events: with his silver hair arranged elaborately and glittering earrings calling attention to the points of his ears, he bore more than a little resemblance to Allura, his half-sister, whose someday child by her husband could potentially supplant Lotor as Zarkon’s heir. Even the children of concubines, like those borne by Chele and Riva, had the potential to become heirs if Zarkon willed it, especially if they showed any inclination to become a new generation of paladins as they grew older. 

“That is a serious statement, your Highness.” Thace inclined his head respectfully towards the prince while his commander was still spluttering, his words calm and solemn. “May we ask you to explain further?” 

“Allura of Altea has not provided sufficient proof of her fertility.” Lotor’s eyes glittered dangerously as he looked across the hall not at Allura, but at Zarkon. “My father’s slaves are fat with his squirming bastards, ready to whelp, and yet his wife remains lovely and slender. Perhaps there are no more Alteans-- excuse me, no more _Galra half-breeds_ because she cannot conceive.” 

“Is this a formal accusation, Lotor?” Allura asked mildly. 

The prince smiled, and glanced down to examine his nails. “Not really.”

General Vylick stood slowly from the table, a cadre of conservatives with him. “I will make it a formal accusation. Prince Lotor speaks the truth, however astonished I find myself in saying so. May I call upon the Empress to provide proof of fertility?”

Lotor looked delighted. 

Allura uncrossed her legs and held out a hand languidly for a goblet of water from a nearby attendant, her expression unruffled, and tipped it to Chele’s lips to coax him to drink, watching patiently as his throat worked. “Certainly.”

“A public consummation?”

“I think not.” She made a moue of distaste. 

“Then what proof will you offer?”

Allura lifted her chin. “Summon my slaves.”

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come yell at me on twitter, tumblr, or plurk if you're into that. Kinks/pairings/scenes you wanna see? Hit me up.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more update before my schedule devolves into actual hell. This chapter was supposed to be way shorter and posted much sooner (and have way more characters), so thank you to everyone who has been waiting so patiently!

***

Mariel sighed in drowsy satisfaction as he reclined in the couch’s low gravity embrace, the weight of his body carefully buoyed against soft, expensive cushions. His three kittens scampered and wrestled around the great mound of his belly, mewling and chattering to him and to their siblings, resisting all attempts to corral them close in his arms for nap time. A tiny, sleek-furred head pushed against his chin and Mariel nuzzled his daughter lovingly, cooing to her as her rusty little purr started up. Her eyes were soft gold, somewhere between his own warm amber and her sire’s bright, nearly neon yellow, and her perked little black ears were tipped with fawn tones. She was smaller than a human baby would’ve been at the same age, but she was growing quickly, her little fuzzy belly full of milk and vitamin supplements to give her strong bones and muscle. She would be short, probably, her sire was not considered tall by Galra standards, but her soft baby claws were already becoming firm and sharp, ready to carry her through scuffles with other kittens as she got old enough to be weaned off milk and start solid foods. Somewhere in the dawn of Galra history, perhaps, she would be learning to hunt for herself. 

All of his babies were old enough now to be installed full time in the community creche to play and tumble with their year-mates, many of whom had already been weaned, but Mariel had been reluctant to let them go. Now that he was a privately owned slave instead of a concubine-for-hire in the harem stable, there would be no more bidding wars over his contract, no more half-Galra litters pushing and squirming inside him, sired by his favorite stud. There were eggs growing inside him now, huge and unyielding, from a species that didn’t have live birth, and they would not need the milk inside his swollen, aching breasts. Better to let his half-grown litter enjoy it while they could. 

It was a promotion, technically, to brood over the eggs of an Empress. He wouldn’t be required to raise them or even name them, which for some concubines was the ideal amount of interaction with the offspring they were contracted to bring into the world. Mariel wasn’t of a similar mind. He would miss raising blind, velvety little grubs into energetic fluffballs that scampered and played and worked themselves into every possible nook and cranny of a nursery, no matter how well kitten-proofed it supposedly was. He would miss the company of his childrens’ sire in his every day life, as he supposed Allura of Altea wouldn’t have much time for him aside from breeding, but there was no way to refuse such a honor. It had never been his choice. He had been given as a wedding gift to the Emperor’s new bride, which officially removed him from the strict regulations of the harem stables and the petty politics between concubines. He would never have to watch the father of his children be outbid by an older, richer, more influential Galra officer and go willingly to that coupling, pretending happiness. He would never have to listen to his species being subtly criticized as too small and fragile for war or mating. An Imperial concubine, even one fallen out of favor, was as inviolate as any member of the royal family, and he was not ungrateful. 

Mariel, who had once been Matthew Holt, remembered the slave mines. 

He stroked both palms over the full roundness of his belly, cupping it absently, feeling the irregular shapes of the eggs that seemed barely contained under his taut, sensitive skin. A small battalion of intricately carved and jewelled containers occupied the nearest of the gravity couch’s many storage areas, full of fragrant, expensive ointments, and he dipped his fingers into one of them, languidly rubbing the cool, thick substance into his skin with slow circles. The kittens chased after his fingers like the little terrors they were, wriggling over him, their small nimble paws pressing and massaging. 

They startled adorably whenever his stomach gurgled. The eggs inside him shifted and settled with every tiny movement, and he pressed the heel of his hand in gently to relieve some of the pressure, grateful for the gravity cushion. The eggs had been so much smaller when he’d first been impregnated, only a little bit bigger than large marbles and faintly spongy, pushed relentlessly inside him by his new owner’s ovipositor while he clawed at the sheets and writhed with the pleasure of it, all mindless, wonderful sensation. He’d never carried eggs like these before, that hardened slowly and grew larger inside him, drawing in nutrients, requiring daily doses of seed to contribute to their growth. The scientist in him wanted to ask if it was the usual process to have a proxy incubate the eggs like this, but the concubine who had trained inside Lady Niwe’s household understood when it was better to be nothing more than a servant fulfilling a task. He was only a vessel here, not a wife or a consort or even a contracted lover. 

Mariel was used to being purchased by masters who wanted him for his ability to bear children. Many Galra soldiers would never win the opportunity to marry or mate above their station, and filling a slave’s belly with their young was sometimes the only chance they might have to carry on their family line. Pure families with weak, thin blood hid their infertility with slave-born children claimed as legitimate heirs, and as it was taboo among the upper classes to offer violence to children or mothers, the concubines who had served such families would be repaid handsomely to buy their silence or even kept on permanent retainer. A single lucky contract could allow the meanest, lowest slave to retire wealthy, respected, and sheltered. 

Of course not all slaves were selected to go through the rigorous training to become concubines, and not all concubines would reach the higher tier status allowing them to bear the children of their masters. A concubine could make or break their reputation with how well they took to being bred. Mariel had never lost a litter. Some of his earlier clients had been shy of his race, his fragile appearance, his brief association with the Druids when they had altered him for his new purpose, but Mariel’s body succumbed eagerly to every stud he’d been put to. His delicacy excited his partners. For all that they pretended to look down on non-Galra species as inferior, they enjoyed the exotic strangeness of his smooth skin and his blunt teeth, his clawless, nimble fingers, how tiny he felt against their larger bodies. They liked to tease him out of his robes, peeling back the layers of expensive fabrics one by one to lay him bare, or sometimes even shredding the knots and ties with their claws in a sort of ritualistic foreplay. Violence against concubines was strictly forbidden, so he had no fear of being bitten or clawed viciously, but his rougher partners enjoyed lifting him against the wall or pinning him down against silken sheets, raking their claws gently over his skin to smear the crimson paint he wore, mimicking the effect of claiming marks. 

His new owner did not care for Galra traditions. Allura of Altea was still mostly a stranger to him and from a culture that had not been covered in his extensive etiquette training. He’d met her only a few times during the lengthy preparations for the wedding ceremony, as she had insisted on keeping herself and her retinue, including Mariel’s long lost sister, completely separate from the Galra ships, only coming aboard for official functions and retreating immediately to their Altean castle-ship. Under harem restrictions Mariel was barely permitted to look at high-ranking guests during ceremonies, much less speak to them, so he had been forced to sit quietly, his fingers braiding themselves into knots like an unschooled trainee, staring at the floor while his sister stayed by Allura’s side as if she’d been chained there. With Zarkon flaunting his control over the Blue and Red Paladins, Mariel could understand why Allura would be over-protective of her remaining allies, but that didn’t change the fact that she deliberately chose to keep Katie away from him. Allura could have pulled him from the stables and installed him in her own private quarters or in Katie’s rooms or even a broom closet on the castle-ship, anything she pleased, and he would have gone grateful and willing, but she held him at arm’s length, preferring to wait until after the wedding to take ownership. Preferring, with insulting obviousness, to see what Galra captivity had made of him. 

Though he was a wedding gift from groom to bride, a gesture of goodwill to restore a broken family, Allura did not necessarily have to accept him. If she decided he was a threat or even a poor influence, she could throw him back. She could wipe his memories and send him back to Earth, as the Druids had done for his father, though the changes in his body might be more difficult to explain away. Either way, he would not remember that he’d ever had a sister, or that he’d ever lost a crewmate. 

Instead, Allura finally made a formal visit to the harem to inspect her not-yet property and closeted Mariel alone for a nerve-wracking, painfully courteous interview. She came without bodyguards, save for her fire-haired advisor, and pointedly wore the armor of the White Paladin, declaring her presence as a warrior. It might have been done to put the anxious stablemasters at ease, mimicking the routine visits of Galra officers shopping for their next favorite, but Mariel felt privately it was to intimidate. Galra culture didn’t permit aggression against concubines or mothers but an Empress could do as she pleased. 

She feigned innocence about the harem stables, asking questions about Mariel’s contracts, about his training, about his rank-mates and his recently born kittens. Her forms were scrupulously correct even while using common Galra, and he didn’t believe for a second that she did not speak the formal dialect. Her advisor certainly did, gregariously chatting with the harem guardians and the serving girls and some of the trainees that passed by. Fishing, as Allura was fishing. 

Mariel answered her honestly where he could and diplomatically where he could not, leaning heavily on his counter-intelligence training. Lady Niwe did not turn all trainee concubines who came to serve her into data collectors and intelligence agents for the Istari, the enigmatic and powerful members of the intergalactic community that hoarded, sold and bartered valuable information across all species, territories, and governments, but she nurtured those with any talent for it. Mariel knew better than to ask about Katie or Shiro. He put on the same mask of pleasantries that had saved him from aggressive alpha males and harem rivals and disgusting, offensive clients, and poured tea, and smiled at Allura as if he were perfectly happy to wait for her decision to let him see his family. 

She did soon after that interview (interrogation, if he were being honest), and he was desperately grateful for it, sobbing in his sister’s arms, but he understood clearly that Allura did not consider him in her confidence. There were questions that even Katie-- Pidge, now-- couldn’t or wouldn’t answer, about the lions and paladins and about Alteans, and he felt that he didn’t know Allura any better than the Galra court officials who were assisting her with the wedding, including the stablemasters, who were wracking their brains trying to figure out how to properly present a gift slave to an Altean royal bride. 

Neither Mariel nor his handlers had any idea what pleased or displeased Allura’s species, so they’d been forced to fall back on the oldest rituals they could find for preparing an Imperial concubine, hoping that those would make an acceptable substitute. Allura’s apparent fondness for humans was well-known, but as a gift from the Emperor to the new Empress Mariel was not just a slave but a representation of the wealth of the Empire. The clothing he wore, the jewels, the perfumes, even the chemical composition of the paint would all represent far flung colonies and settlements, the most exotic and fabulous of their exports. 

For several weeks during and after the wedding he’d eaten a special diet, exotic fruits and frothy, bubbling concoctions, sweet wines and bites of specially prepared dishes, all to sweeten his scent and enhance the taste of his skin. He’d soaked in steaming, flower-and-herb strewn baths and immersed himself in cool, creamy pink-white liquids that were supposed to cake and dry, and then be cracked and peeled from his skin with tiny tools and brushes as a kind of purification. He was massaged, prayed over, painted, smoke-steamed, washed and groomed and sanctified a dozen times over, giving him time, allegedly, to free himself from his previous attachments and conditions; a polite euphemism for the fact that he was still nursing kittens from the owner of his last contract. The stablemasters made noises about finding a wet nurse substitute but Mariel refused to consider the thought. He would go to his mating with dark nipples and milk-heavy breasts. Allura didn’t seem the type to appreciate pretense, and she knew full well how many litters he’d carried for the Galra because she’d asked about it.

The stablemasters had chosen gold and amber for his colors, jewelry set with tiger’s eye and topaz weighing down his wrists, ankles, earlobes, and nipples. A delicate gold chain hung from his pierced clitoris, swaying between his spread thighs, the weight of the small jewel at the end pulling at him with every tiny movement. His skin had been dusted with gold powder until it shone under the light, the intricate patterns of his slave markings painted on with brilliant reds and golds to draw the eye. The sigils for strong seed and strong children covered his belly, parting around the soft golden mesh that concealed his penis, and flowed into symbols for conception and joyful, willing breeding around his hips and inner thighs. One of his first lessons as a concubine had been learning how to sit still under the artist’s brush while they drew long, graceful lines on his skin in cool, wet paint. 

An Imperial mating required even more elaborate preparations, and he’d sat under the attentions of no less than three separate painters, all of them murmuring the ritual words as their brushes teased over his skin. They drew delicate lines that were meant to be smudged during the passion of breeding, and symbols to stir him to lust, and intricate designs to highlight the lovely contours of his body. The faint itch of the paint drying was a stimulant; the attendants dipped their fingers into the little ceramic pots of shining gilt paint and drew them down the length of his tiny nub of a penis, ignoring the way it made him shiver and gasp. Cool dabs of gold highlighted his clitoris, and the softest fine-tipped brushes drew spirals and circles in wet paint along the flushed lips of his sex and around the winking, sensitive furl of his asshole. 

The itch as it dried slowly nearly drove him mad, and he trembled on his hands and knees while the other attendants lifted and brushed out his long honey-colored hair, oiling it until it shone and then deftly looping and braiding it through with jewels and luminescent ribbons. It was arranged in such a way that a suitor or Mariel himself might unpin the whole thing with a few careful tugs and bring it tumbling down around his shoulders. Gold patterns tipped the very edges of his nails on both hands and feet, echoing the elaborate designs that might decorate a Galra’s claws, and the attendant in charge of cosmetics for his face clucked over the faint scars and set about darkening his lashes with a soft, dusky powder, outlining his mouth and painting around his eyes with tiny brushes. The glittering substance brushed over his lips was deceptively soft and satiny, laced with gentle aphrodisiacs. His breasts were tipped with the same, the mixture holding up under the welling droplets of milk he couldn’t help producing whenever his tits were handled or he became unbearably aroused. The attendants milked his aching teats thoroughly into jeweled cups for the purpose before fetching and setting in his nipple jewelry, and they gave him small toys to clench around as they worked, careful not to smudge the paint. 

Almost all concubines preparing for a breeding tryst swallowed fireseed, quintessence-soaked berries of a particular flowering plant that enhanced fertility and could also induce heat or rut in many species. Mariel, shaped by the Druids and their quintessence experiments in a distorted mimicry of a Galra queen, was no exception. His senses seemed to both sharpen and dull at the same time, new scents leaping out at him despite the fragrant riot of perfumes and lotions, sweet-smelling cosmetics and floral infused hair treatments. The attendants surrounding him had deliberately neutral smells, non-viable mates, and they faded into the background like so much white noise while a small fire built in his belly. It was best if he was already roused to a fever pitch before being presented to the Empress. There was no way of knowing if she would be quick with him or inclined to take her time, and it would reflect poorly on the harem if Mariel appeared in any way to be reluctant or unready. 

He was ushered through the hallways in a small procession, naked save for his paints and jewels, walking underneath a sheer, silken canopy that several bearers held up around him like a box of enclosing fabric. The only things a spectator would be able to see of him were his ankles and bare feet, but it still felt like he was exposed in front of dozens of eyes, the scent of his perfume and his rising heat wafting out and catching the interest of guards, soldiers, even slaves along the way. The armored guardians that accompanied any concubine to a transaction not taking place within the harem’s pleasure rooms wouldn’t permit any strange males near, of course, but there was still the heady, wild feeling that at any moment a rut maddened Galra might challenge the guardians and rip aside the silk canopy, desperate for a glimpse of him or a single, fleeting touch. Mariel was a broodmare being led through a gauntlet of excited, violent stallions, listening to their snorting breaths and smelling their eagerness, separated only by pieces of thin silk. 

The procession was not headed to the Imperial apartments but to a specific suite of rooms set aside for concubines of the royal family. It would be equipped for any manner of circumstances, whether his mistress wished him to serve her in a tea ceremony while he was naked and quivering or if she would prefer him in costumes, in restraints, floating languidly in the sunken bath, bent over the milking bench, or suspended in the air above the bed. A squad of Altean drones met them at the checkpoint denoting Allura’s private section of the flagship where no Galra were permitted, save for the Emperor himself. 

The attendants fidgeted despite their training and glanced about themselves nervously, eager to be gone. The guardians were more impassive, expressions hidden behind their armored masks, but Mariel couldn’t help noticing the way they gripped their ceremonial weapons a little tighter. It was not the drones they feared so much as what lay beyond the checkpoint -- this section of the Dreadnought was near the launch bays.

The drones would be his escort past this point. Mariel’s handlers and guardians stood back to let him proceed alone and unsheltered, with only a wrapped shawl of the lightest, sheerest fabric, glittering and worked with celestial symbols, his feet bare on the cool metal floor. The white and silver Altean robots marched in perfect unison around him, silent. Scuttlebutt held that Altean drones didn’t understand Galra speech and would lash out indiscriminately, but in the early grip of heat Mariel found that fact distant and unimportant. He drew shallow breaths, skin flushed despite the coolness of the air and his minimal covering. The natural fear and anxiety he should have been feeling was far away, drowned under the rising fire of instinct. He didn’t want to be in this chain of cold, isolated hallways devoid of male scents. He wanted the comforting familiarity of the harem’s pleasure rooms, but he clung grimly to the knowledge that the drones were taking him to a breeding chamber, and he would be properly attended there. 

He went through several more checkpoints, knowing himself scanned for weapons and identity verification at each one, before finally being led past what used to be a battleship hangar. He could see the hasty welding jobs where thick steel doors and extra airlock chambers had been added, and Altean runes worked into the metal. He couldn’t read them, but he could guess at their meanings: runes of binding, of quiet calm, of containment. 

The White Lion lay beyond.

It was alone in the empty hangar, as it could not be trusted around people or even its own brethren. The Emperor had spared no expense to give each of the other lions their own personalized environments, converting massive sections of the Dreadnought for their use, but not this one. The great metal beast lay on bare, gouged steel in the darkness, as neither magic nor technology could keep the lights on inside the hangar. Electronics malfunctioned and devices failed in the White Lion’s presence. 

It reclined at ease like a sphinx, deceptively docile, but Mariel knew full well the shadows hid massive chains that anchored its legs and collar, and despite the runes its golden eyes were slitted open in the low light, tracking the progress of his little procession. Even with its full dimensions cloaked in shadow it was immense; bigger perhaps than the Black Lion. There were dark stains in the grooves and pits of its silver metal jaws, and its claws flexed and twitched like a real animal’s, scoring the floor. It did not look particularly contained or controlled. It looked like a predator at ease, waiting for the right moment.

It was, like Zarkon himself, was a master of enthralling weak minds, promising its power to anyone that made the mistake of listening to its silent voice, promising to serve anyone that would step into its jaws. The paladin of the White Lion could potentially take control of Voltron, the divine weapon that had cemented Altean military control all those centuries ago. The paladin of the White Lion could break an empire, or rebuild one. 

The White Lion was also a man-eater. Mariel had heard wild rumors among the soldiers and the concubines who served them, delicately ferreting out information, but the copies of Istari spy reports that passed through Lady Niwe’s hands from her quiet legions of informants and secret-sellers told even more chilling stories. Supposedly the long lost sixth lion of Voltron had been sealed away for its awful ferocity after it had been created. Supposedly it had refused to submit itself to a mortal companion, and instead devoured the souls of the potential captains that tried to claim it, draining their quintessence and dissolving their bodies into ash and shadow. It was said that the great temple that had been the creature’s previous home had turned, over generations, into a charnel house, all of the priests charged with keeping it either fled or succumbed to the deadly siren lure of its power. The warning runes carved into the gate of bones at the temple entrance described a thousand thousand souls lost to feed its hunger, but Allura of Altea, daughter of Alfor God-King, had gone into the temple alone and conquered it, forced it to bend to her will. There was supposedly a burn mark on its muzzle, a charred, blackened scar from the imprint of her hand.

Mariel didn’t know how anyone could have gotten close enough to see such a thing. Even with Allura as its captain, the White Lion still exerted that awful seductive pull on everything living around it, calling out to the unwary. Mariel tried to keep his head down and his eyes on the floor in front of him, trying to ignore the crawling feeling between his shoulder blades of being observed. In the chemical grip of his induced heat he wasn’t frightened so much as irritated at the overwhelming sense of _male presence_ nearby that was not a real, viable mate, and he could hear himself growling faintly, a deep vibration in his belly. His kittens were nowhere nearby but he was still a mother and implanted with the instincts of a Galra queen, and he did not care for strange, powerful males in his space. 

_Human cub,_ it whispered to him. 

Mariel looked at it.

The drones registered his falter and buzzed at him like a swarm of angry hornets. He forced his eyes down and kept walking, staring hard at his feet, painted for a concubine’s mating. His head felt foggy with oncoming heat, conflicting emotions pushing and pulling at him. 

_Blood of lions._ Chains rattled across the floor. _Mother of cubs._

Inside his head, images spooled out. His children, his mate, his life as a slave. The lion was interested in the quintessence simmering in his blood. It was interested in the anger that curdled in the very pit of his stomach, the old, hot hatred he'd nursed for overseers in the mines and their whips, for soldiers and their grabbing hands, for the arena and its howling zealots.

It asked him, cold and delicate as a breath of fog, if he would not like to return to his home planet, to his former self. If he would like revenge on every creature that had ever raised a hand to him and those he loved. If he would like freedom, and power, and untold secrets of the universe made plain to him. He was a scientist, or had been, a prodigy of his generation, and he survived now by whispering secrets and spreading his legs for the militaristic creatures that had ruined his life and saw him as nothing more than a hole to breed.

It did not have to be so.

He saw himself standing by the White Lion’s great head, its jaws washed crimson, looking out over a burning plain of crashed, destroyed Galra warships. Screams rose from the twisted metal wreckage, but Mariel knew it was equal and just revenge for the carnage the Empire had wrought on countless innocent worlds, and he felt only satisfaction. He saw himself floating above the Earth, a guardian protecting her from any threat of invasion. He saw himself exploring new planets, fearless and happy. He saw himself as a rescuer instead of the victim in need of rescue. 

It asked if he wished to protect his children, born and unborn, and the father of his kittens, who had done so much to protect him while Mariel remained a helpless, fragile slave, useful only while his youth and charms lasted. As a paladin, he could have his family restored. His sister and his oldest friend would never have to go into battle again. He could save them from what they’d become. He could have his parents and his sister and his innocent halfblood children and his Galra soldier and also his dear friend, his guilty ideal, subject of a thousand illicit fantasies; he could have anything he wanted. He would never have to choose between human and alien halves of his life. If he favored a Galra soldier and a human gladiator, both would beg for the opportunity to please him. He went now to service an Empress, would he not like to be serviced by one instead? 

_No,_ he flung back at it, heat-maddened, furiously rejecting such overtly empty promises, and was surprised to find the White Lion amused, treating him to breathlessly graphic images of a mating between flesh and metal, the cockpit shaping itself to his pleasure and the meeting of their spirits in a place where physical bodies didn’t matter. The lion would be pleased to answer all his desires. The lion would be pleased to see to his heat and fill him with cubs. It showed him his small, furless alien form approach a radiant white lion-body in that spirit place where such things could happen, their heads bent close together as spirit Mariel accepted the lion’s tongue into his mouth and put his arms around its glowing shoulders, drawing it down to cover his smaller body. His thighs clamped around its sides and it lowered its hips to meet his upraised ones, sheathing its heavy cock smoothly and easily inside of him. His tongue lolled and his fingers knotted in its fur as it bred him gently, a shining light radiating from underneath the skin where the lion poured its essence into him. Then the image changed to one of him on all fours like a cat himself, thighs braced wide, arching his back and presenting his eager cunt to the radiant spirit, and the lion lowered its muzzle and licked him there tenderly until he quivered and sobbed before it reared up to mount him. It rocked him with powerful thrusts, furry muscular haunches flexing over his pale human thighs, his face transformed in ecstasy, and he could see his belly hung huge and pendulous with young.

It was impossible to deny the traitorous curl of pleasure at the images. His cunt throbbed fiercely as the little gold chain swung between his thighs, his heat fully upon him, and Mariel felt his milk well up, sliding slow and ticklish down his bare breasts. When he glanced down at it he could see the vision made real on his own body: his stomach distended in late stage pregnancy, squirming ripples of movement under the skin as his strong, healthy cubs moved and pushed, his breasts engorged with milk. His hands smoothed reverently over his huge belly, the illusion all-encompassing as he cupped it and felt its weight, and for one dazed moment he thought _yes, please yes._

Then he was standing before the door of the breeding room, alone, and did not remember how he’d got there. His drone escort was gone, his vision and his shape were back to normal. He looked around wildly, panting, his skin still shivering. He was so wet now he felt it smearing between his thighs, and he wanted to be fucked so badly he could hardly stand it.

The door was before him. The Empress was waiting. He pushed a hand blindly in front of him and stumbled forward.

The air inside was warmer, almost humid; he felt it roll over his feverish skin like a wave. He could taste expensive perfume and incense, rut and heat and the tang of pleasure in progress. His nostrils flared, drinking it in, and he could hear the wet sounds of sex. It gave him a few seconds to prepare as he swept aside the silken veils hanging from the ceiling and found his mistress already conveniently bare on the lavish bed, her thighs spread wide astride the hips of a muscular male figure that was bound neck to ankles in heavy restraints and wearing a full hood like a dangerous bird of prey. The only parts of him visible were his heavy balls and the angry purple-red of his ridged cock disappearing into her as she rode him backwards, and as Mariel watched he saw it swell and pulse, emptying itself in long, steady pushes without forming the knot typical to Galra soldiers. The Empress shuddered lightly, her eyes half-lidded and dreamy as she milked her partner dry, and Mariel heard the muffled groans coming from underneath the hood. 

Training silenced any stupidity his heat-dumb tongue might have given voice to. It was not his place to say anything, and he’d entered into stranger scenes during his career. If the new Empress wished to enjoy a male before she bred him that was her prerogative, and if she wanted him to watch her play with her other slaves he would do so, and if she wanted him to participate he would do that as well. Mariel didn’t lower his gaze, knowing his eyes must be black and blown with breeding lust, his skin flushed under the gold paint. Alteans were a species that blushed themselves, unlike the Galra. The glow in Allura’s cheeks made her look young and desperately beautiful, the diamonds threaded through her silvery hair glittering mutely in the low light. Her breasts heaved with exertion. She wore no other jewelry or symbols of rank, and the muscles of her shoulders and thighs would have suited a warrior, matching the claim that she had personally challenged Zarkon to a duel to determine the fate of the war and was also a paladin of Voltron in her own right. The restraints on the prone figure underneath her seemed excessive for what he understood about Altean strength, but he had no patience for that puzzle now.

“My Lady Empress,” he managed, trying not to pant as he dipped gracefully to press the pads of two fingers to the ground in a courtesan’s obeisance. As he rose he let go of the silken modesty wrap, allowing it to slide slowly from his skin and reveal the artistry of his naked body in a gesture of calculated sensuality. A thousand hours of practice let him do it without trembling, but his skin was burning hot with the need to be touched. 

She was not, as he might have expected, interested in conversation. If she couldn’t smell his heat she was at least aware of it, and when she rose from the bed to come to him there was an obscene slick sound as her captive’s spent organ, glistening wet and still impressive, slid from her body. Mariel watched in hazy fascination as something like a tentacle unwrapped from it. Female Alteans apparently had prehensible ovipositors as well as female sex organs, and when he put his mouth to it he found it squirming eagerly over his tongue, nudging towards the back of his throat. He sucked her gratefully, losing himself in her sweetness. The Empress tugged him back by his hair and he watched, dazed, as the ovipositor wriggled its way between the flushed lips of her own cunt and disappeared inside, pulsing strangely, and then reappear swollen and dripping with seed. Gorging itself, he realized, on the spend of the male that she’d mounted, either cleaning herself to prevent a pregnancy or simply transferring the seed. He swallowed what the ovipositor spurted down his throat and licked at the writhing thing in encouragement when she delved inside herself for more. His tongue traced the places where the lips of her sex stretched around the ovipositor, and she shuddered above him, her strong hands flexing in his hair. Her ovipositor buried itself in his mouth, holding its precious cargo of borrowed seed, and he could feel the base of it begin to bulge with knobby shapes. Waiting eggs. 

Cubs, he thought incongruously, and sucked her all the more eagerly, craving, rubbing his hands over his flat belly without conscious thought. He wanted to be as huge and heavy as he’d been in the vision, he wanted to feel his swollen belly bounce and sway as she fucked him full.

She led him to the huge expanse of the bed, ignoring the anonymous male still breathing quietly in his restraints, and directed Mariel to his hands and knees over the prone figure, his head towards the captive’s feet. Under the chains and cuffs and what looked like a latex straitjacket was a humanoid body, smaller than a Galra and lacking any hint of fur or scales near the opening where his cock jutted free, still a bit flushed and not all the way soft despite its recent use. It looked like a Galra organ but smaller, a lighter shade of purple, and the thick ridges had been pierced with a series of small silver rings and round studs that didn’t match the usual warrior patterns he’d seen before. It twitched for him as he bent over it, the exhalations from his breath cooling the wet slick that still covered it.

He didn’t know if the sight and scent of a cock was meant to be inspiring to a concubine who had serviced more males than females, but this position was a familiar one, and with a look back over his shoulder for permission from the Empress he lowered his head to the flagging penis, nuzzling at it. The unknown male grunted sharply and growled, reminding Mariel of the spirit lion, but that growl petered off into a moan when Mariel slid his mouth down over the violet, velvet-soft crown and began to suckle gently.

Allura’s hands meanwhile drifted over the graceful arch of Mariel’s back, tracing and smearing the painted lines meant for that purpose, tracing his hips, his plush round cheeks, dipping between them to find him wet and willing, quivering with impatience. The Empress smeared the gold paint from his decorated cunt over her fingertips. She cupped the weight of his breasts, leaking steadily now, and stroked his soft, flat belly contemplatively, making him whine around the soft cock he was warming. She knew what he wanted and was teasing him. Her weight behind him caused the bed to dip. 

When he felt that first considering brush of a slick, hot organ against the plump lips of his sex he moaned for it. He wanted to be mounted, to be bred, to feel her weight on his back as she thrust into him. He flexed his hips to coax it back, and then gasped in surprise when it darted suddenly between his thighs, flexible as an eel, and wriggled inside the soft mesh covering him to wrap itself around his small, sensitive penis. A well-trained concubine didn’t need to wear an impenetrable metal cage at all times the way some wilful Galra studs did, and Mariel had long since graduated to thin decorative sheaths, harnesses, and jewelled mesh coverings. The first few inches of the ovipositor were slender and smooth, perfectly tapered, wet with seed, and it stroked and squeezed him delicately, shockingly deft, bringing him to a quick, unexpected orgasm while he furiously sucked the cock in front of him. 

The Empress mounted him like her lion, her fingers clawed into his skin, her hips working and rolling as her long, flexible organ wriggled deep into him, stretching him, preparing him to receive the eggs that bulged and shifted in the thick base of her ovipositor. They pushed and pressed inexorably, rubbing deliciously against his insides as he moaned and writhed and climaxed helplessly, over and over, his sensitive little cocklet spasming. He had no thought for the captive beneath him, who at some forgotten point had been permitted his mouth free and lapped hungrily at Mariel’s bouncing, spurting breasts when they dragged over his face. Gold smeared over the captive’s lips and over his impressive cock where Mariel had been nursing it; in the back of his mind Mariel could smell something very close to rut rising in the air, as if the captive were responding to the Galra-baiting pheromones that Mariel wore. Allura growled with her efforts and Mariel purred, lifting his hips into it, dazedly imagining soft fur between his clutching fingers and soft, glowing light sliding into his empty womb, filling it. 

Eventually his trembling arms had given out and he slumped forward against the silken sheets next to the other male, dazed with pleasure, mindlessly, rhythmically milking the ovipositor buried deep within him, his ass held high by Allura’s effortless strength and feeling the swell of his stomach underneath him grow larger with each egg fucked into him. He was leaking milk with every thrust, thin streams spraying onto the sheets and the captive’s latex suit and his exposed skin, and the captive rooted his blind, masked face against him until Mariel shifted just enough to let him suckle, instinctively cradling his hooded head to his needy, aching teats. The stranger latched on and began to nurse in earnest, and Mariel whimpered and came again helplessly at how good it felt. 

Later, after the frenzy of his heat wore down, Mariel had been coaxed up onto his knees to sit in his owner’s lap, plugged by the ovipositor still firmly sheathed inside him and kept warm by his body until it wriggled back to life for the third round, and he had been able to look down and see the visible bump rounding out his belly. He caressed it in delight, drunk on the sensation of how full he was. The lumpy, irregular shapes shifted inside him with every movement, precious and vulnerable; the only viable eggs of their kind in the entire expanse of the galaxy. 

He found out much later how delicate and finicky Altean reproduction was, especially for a young, untried sire like Allura. He thought for a strange, unsettling moment of the White Lion’s phantom satisfaction, but logic told him that Allura had bred him, the hooded male had bred him, and he’d been in heat, susceptible to strange thoughts and fantasies. The Galra were already hugely superstitious about Alteans and the Voltron lions, and he said nothing over the test results proving a successful conception. The last thing he wanted to do was appear overly interested in the White Lion. 

By the end of his heat he’d been so exhausted he could barely force his eyes to focus, cradling his stomach, sore and sweaty and sticky. In the harem this would’ve been the moment where lesser concubines or servants entered the room to attend the lovers, seeing separately to their needs. Male Galra would be ravenous and dehydrated after knotting, possessive if it was in their nature to care for their partners, some tender and some brooding. Some rolled away from the concubine they’d enjoyed and moved right into mounting the attendants, selfishly riding out the last vestiges of their rut between the thighs of a new partner, and then waved over the covered dishes of steaming meats so they could eat their own bodyweight in protein, trusting the concubine to see themselves out. Other males took the proffered water containers and warm towels and trays of finger food, perfect for hand feeding a lover, and attended their partners personally, especially if the tryst had been for breeding. Baths would be drawn and the sheets changed efficiently, and the traditional incenses for relaxation and restful sleep would be lit. Mariel was used to drowsing, satiated and well-serviced, while the father of his kittens groomed him gently. His favorite pastime in their mating bed had been to unpin and unbraid Mariel’s elaborate, stable-designated hairstyles, delicately running his claws through until Mariel’s long honey-colored hair fell loose across his hands. 

He had no such expectations of an Empress. If Allura called for servants or drones or a troupe of dancing boys to enter the room he was too foggy to notice, he only knew that deft, gentle hands unhooked and removed the metal jewelry he wore and drew soft, scented clothes over his skin, carefully scrubbing away paint and sweat-streaked gold dust. He shivered when they drew close to the mess between his thighs but parted his legs obediently, swallowing a whimper when his mesh cage was removed and his cock handled, and the heavy gold chain hung from his clitoris was carefully lifted and detached. A slender plug with a jeweled handle was pressed gently into him and he sighed, clenching reflexively around it once it was in place. 

The last surviving ornaments were picked out of his hair and he was coaxed to his feet, a plush robe wrapped around his shoulders, and led blindly through a hallway into a separate chamber that didn’t smell of rut. He was pressed down to the bed there and given a hot, sweet drink to sip, his hands wrapped carefully around the warm teacup. He supposed, drowsing and ensconced in an enormous pile of soft, fuzzy blankets, that the other slave must have been untied and taken care of, and he had missed his chance to see the other’s face. 

The bed was soft and inviting but cool, the sheets freshly laundered and smelling of faint floral notes, and Mariel swallowed down the tiny pricks of dissatisfaction at being sent off to sleep alone. A Galra queen in heat was exceedingly picky about her breeding and sleeping spaces, preferring her nest smell like safety and comfort, but concubines dosed with fireseed were expected to step on those lingering instincts for the convenience of their masters. Mariel wanted his soldier to snuggle against, to feel that deep rumbling purr vibrating against his chest, and he wanted the familiar delicate rake of claws through his hair, combing it out. He also thought, for the first time in a long time, of the old creaky bunkbeds in the Garrison barracks, and falling asleep over his textbooks in Shiro’s bed, feeling him sigh in exasperation and curl up behind him rather than try to shuffle him back to his own room. It had been so long ago it felt like they’d been barely more than children, unscarred and so, so naive. He’d thought he didn’t dare act on his feelings because he’d been afraid, worried that their careers would be jeopardized. That fear seemed like such a joke, now. 

He slept, and did not remember his dreams. 

In the weeks after he’d grown slowly accustomed to his new status as the eggs inside him grew and hardened, wiping away the lingering fear that he might be thrown back for failure to conceive. Being given into the Imperial household as a breeder was a career achievement that every concubine dreamed of, but only if they were able to successfully conceive. Mariel had been known as a reliable dam in the harem, carrying strong, healthy hybrid infants despite his own comparatively small size and lack of biological weaponry. Galra soldiers were all too often more impressed by brawn than brains, favoring dangerous concubines as a way of proclaiming their own dominance. Mariel was too weak, too small, too soft to offer any sort of status-boosting challenge, exotic only in his rarity and his knack for languages and learning on the fly, but he’d surprised all his handlers with his capacity for breeding. His body had never rejected a properly conducted mating and he’d never lost a kitten, and even the runts of his litters were healthier than the kits from other attempted crossbreeds. 

He was grateful, of course. Now that he was officially part of Allura’s retinue, he had been moved out of the harem and into private apartments near his sister. There were no more snooping servants or gossipy trainees in and out of his rooms at all hours, no dawn rituals to attend, no surprise inspections by the stablemasters to see if he’d taken any lovers outside of his contracts. A skeleton crew made up of members from allied species populated the Altean castle-ship that trailed the fleet, but aboard the Dreadnought Allura employed drones and robots as servants so Mariel was able, for once, to enjoy some actual privacy behind closed doors. In public the looks cast in his direction were baffled and envious instead of disdainful, and fewer voices made snide comments about the stablemasters having to go through the refuse piles in the slave mines for their diamonds. 

Most importantly, the children he’d already borne would be elevated as well. No matter what happened to him, none of them would grow up to be slaves. 

Allura was magnanimous enough to let Mariel spend as much time as he wished with his children, either in the creche or in his personal chambers, and she didn’t press him to stay away from their sire as would have been her right as his new owner. Family, she’d told him, was more important to her than anything else in the galaxy. She gave him free rein to assist Pidge and Coran with projects and research on Altean technology, choosing to trust him despite his long stint in Galra captivity. Mariel could only assume something about the mating had changed Allura’s mind, or his sister had vouched for him, or both. 

Or perhaps Allura was even more politically savvy than anyone suspected. She asked him soft questions about the state of the court as he understood it, who to watch for and who to flatter, and did not ask how he knew what he knew. More than half of the concubines serving aboard the flagship had ties to the Istari spy rings. Mariel was no exception. 

By now his rambunctious daughter had grown tired of wrestling with her brothers and minced with her little claws across his torso, batting playfully at the delicate chains that ran between his breasts and draped over his belly, a waterfall of gold connected to the simple, supple collar around his neck. In the comfort of his own bower he was free to wear as much or as little ornamentation as he liked, but he was more conscious of appearances than his twin sister, who was permanently cemented in her status as a paladin of Voltron. The Green Paladin, who had been given the Galra name Nial, for emerald, was free to do almost anything she pleased so long as the Green Lion acknowledged her as its captain. Her quarters were even more lavish than the imperial apartments, hosting an entire living ecosystem and designed to soothe the borrowed instincts of the Green Lion. 

The Emperor had always been confident of his victory. There were similar chamber complexes for each of the paladins, centered around each of their elements, constructed long before Voltron had re-emerged in the universe and waiting, empty; elaborate terrariums for the paladins Zarkon had been sure he would collect and convert to his service someday.

Mariel squirmed on the silken cushions as the network of chains strung all the way down to his pierced sex drew taut across his distended stomach, eliciting a series of tiny shivers. The delicate links bit faintly into his skin when they tightened, never enough to cause real discomfort or restriction of movement but a reminder of their presence, measured perfectly for him, strung and restrung the larger he grew, designed specifically to pull and tease him. 

His daughter had discovered the mound of his breast and had begun to knead with her strong little paws, rooting with her nose, encouraging droplets of warm, sweet milk to bead at his nipples and overflow, leaking down his skin in tiny rivulets. All the usual decorative piercings and jewelry had been removed, set aside while he had a litter still nursing, and his tits were sore and swollen, uncomfortably full no matter how he massaged them. He needed to be milked, or fucked, or both; the hormones surging through him were intended to cater to over-enthusiastic Galra studs.

All of his children chirped at the burst of sweet milk-scent, tiny heads questing this way and that as if they were still helpless, nearly blind newborns and not perfectly capable of seeing what was in front of their noses. Mariel absently guided his daughter’s seeking mouth to a sore, dark nipple, sighing as she latched on and began to suckle voraciously, relieving the pressure with every long greedy swallow. The lot of them had been fed only a few hours ago but they were greedy with him, happy to drink as long as his body had something to give. 

Their sire had been much the same way. For a product of the uncompromising Imperial military he’d been patient with Mariel, even gentle, but unrelenting. Their mating had been the first time Mariel understood exactly what his Druid-altered body was capable of, that he was strong now, and enduring, that he was capable of demanding satisfaction for his own desires, and that he could hold power over a Galra male. 

Mariel let a hand trail down along the body-warm links of the chains, tracing over his chest, his egg-swollen belly, down to the juncture of his thighs, remembering soft-furred cheeks nuzzling between them, spreading them wide while their kittens nursed contentedly at Mariel’s breasts, oblivious. He shut his eyes and let his head tip back as one of his sons clambered to the neglected teat and began to suck, the familiar pleasure-pain sensation coursing through him as he stroked his fingers idly between his legs. The Empress didn’t follow harem rules in keeping a male organ caged in a chastity device at all times, so his small cocklet was stiff and aching as his knuckles brushed against it, white milky liquid beading at its little flushed tip. 

His soldier had been fascinated with it as much as he’d been fascinated with Mariel’s female attributes. Some Galra males found the presence of a vestigial male phallus on a concubine irritating, and preferring it be caged or otherwise kept concealed, but his soldier had been forever skirting the rules of the harem stable, unlocking Mariel’s cage to tease and stroke him, even taking that tiny sensitive length into his mouth to roll across his tongue and suckle experimentally. He delighted in the way it made Mariel contract around him, thighs clamping together, bent over gasping for air and pulling at his mane. He’d said he loved the way Mariel tasted. He’d spent hours between Mariel’s trembling thighs, licking him into slow, quivering orgasms before ever deigning to push his tongue inside Mariel’s throbbing cunt. 

Sighing over the memory, Mariel stretched his arms up over his head and crossed his wrists unprompted, careful not to jostle his nursing babies, and rocked his hips up slightly, the only stimulation from the long chains strung all the way from his collar down to his pierced clit. The mound of his pregnant belly drew the chains taut if he arched his back just right and wriggled his hips, little zings of pleasure lighting up his nerves as he teased himself. There were no rules here about keeping his hands to himself or remaining needy and untouched while Allura was away, but he liked the pretense, imagining that he was back in his soldier’s hands, being watched from across the room as the lips of his cunt grew fat and flushed, parting on their own, slick glistening along the divide. 

He teased himself slowly, thoroughly, his children well-versed by now in getting in a full meal despite their dam’s wiggling. They sucked him eagerly as his hips rocked, heels planted, the gold bangles around his slender ankles jingling in time. His last litter of four had still been nursing when his soldier had put these three kittens in his belly, tiny mewling voices an accompaniment to Mariel’s soft, sobbing demands to be bred again. He’d been fucked while his breasts bounced and leaked milk with every thrust, exciting the kittens, and when he finally came on his mate’s thick knot his nipples spurted wildly, vulgar and shocking. His soldier had held him and licked him clean, playfully competing with his own sons for the chance to suckle while Mariel clutched at him, pleading to be milked. It was the first time his body had ever gone into heat for a Galra male without either of them using fireseed as a catalyst, and he’d had the brief, traitorous thought that this was what it was like to respond to a mate. 

He came suddenly, quietly, hands still above his head and a muffled noise escaping his lips as pleasure lit through him in quick, ebbing waves. His cunt pulsed, the flow of his milk increasing as his children nursed and swallowed greedily. For a moment, relaxing back into the softness of the cushions, it was almost like nothing had changed. The air was full of the scent of faint harem perfumes and milk, kitten fur and the pheromone sweetness of satiated breeder. 

Then he felt the faint butterfly touch of his sister’s hand on his shoulder. 

She wasn’t in the room with him, he knew the door was firmly shut and guarded by no less than four of her terrifying floating drones and two Altean gladiator robots. It was only an echo in that strange mental space that all the Voltron paladins developed. The lion bond, catalyzed by quintessence and Altean energy and the strange powers of magical lion-shaped robots that whispered inside their captains’ minds. Mariel wasn’t a captain himself but he had felt that same soft echo, staring into the Green Lion’s glowing gold eyes for the first time as it lowered its huge head down to him, inspecting him. It knew him. It recognized him. In another life, perhaps, it would have called to him, and he understood at that moment what the White Lion had meant when it named him ‘blood of lions.’ 

He thought now that perhaps the Druids who had experimented on him had known that and used him as a prototype. Quintessence was a precious resource. At the time there wasn’t much reason for him to have been dosed with it, acclimated to it, no reason to have altered his body to such an extent. Now that he had seen the Red and Blue Paladins in their captivity, it was impossible not to draw parallels.

Mariel pressed his hand to his shoulder, reaching back along that tenuous thread, but there was nothing he could sense at the other end. Pidge was linked to all the paladins and all the lions, a larger web of connections that Mariel wasn’t sensitive enough to comprehend. His line to her was weak and fragile in comparison. 

It was still enough to push him to sit up, scooping up his protesting babies and kissing their furry little heads, depositing them safely aside in the warm hollows of the cushions as he rose to his feet. The delicate links of his chains clinked softly with each movement, and he made a soft noise of exasperation at the droplets of milk still sliding ticklishly down his chest. Outside the altered gravity of the couch his body felt heavy and unwieldy, the eggs inside him resettling. He could certainly empathize with the Blue Paladin’s inclination to spend as much of his days as possible in the water environments that had been designed for him, and it was rumored that the Red Paladin, now near his time, submerged himself daily in boiling sulphur springs and an extremely carefully constructed artificial lava pool, so strongly connected to his lion that the heat didn’t touch him. 

Not so long ago, Mariel would have scoffed at such a story. Now, having watched his sister coax plants to life with a stroke of her fingers, he was no longer surprised at anything associated with the Voltron lions or their captains.

Sensing movement, several of Pidge’s floating helper drones whirred to life from around the room. They were little flying pyramids with trailing arms, programmed to protect, assist, and occasionally get in the way as they tried to anticipate his needs. One whisked over to the kittens with bottles of warm, vitamin-enriched milk on the off-chance that they hadn’t already drunk their greedy fill, and another offered him a warm, damp sponge in a silver basin. 

“Lights,” he commanded, scrubbing himself briskly while two more drones deftly wet down his hair with spray and worked a perfumed cleanser into it. He hadn’t planned on making any arduous trips outside the bower today, but that frisson of unease had disturbed him. 

The illumination in the room changed to his favorite configuration. Galaxies of sparkling stars filled the walls and ceiling, and glowing points of light appeared in the black void under his feet whenever he took a step. A gigantic red star flamed across one entire wall. There were no true windows in this particular part of the ship and even if there were, the view would be a monotonous array of battleships clustering around the central hub that was the Dreadnought. 

He resisted the urge to ask for a projected display of the fleet anyway. If the lions were agitated he might see them circling the castle-ship like alarmed birds, and it still wouldn’t tell him what had happened, if anything _had_ actually happened. Mariel wasn’t privy to the constant flow of emotions between the lions and their paladins, only their faintest echoes, a fact for which he was sometimes grateful when his sister came to him furious over someone else’s emotions. 

Momentarily free of kitten fuzz and milk stickiness, Mariel accepted both a datapad and a plush, expensive robe from a drone. The nimble artificial fingers of another drone held his long hair aloft, brushing it out in sections to dry with jets of air, and began to rebraid it respectably with gold ribbon and slender strings of gems, multiple arms dancing in a complicated pattern. In the harem Mariel would have done this for himself, or he would have been attended by another, lower ranked concubine. Pidge, older, harder than the girl he remembered, preferred the company of her machines. A machine would always be as loyal and as trustworthy as it had been programmed to be, she said. 

He activated the spy programming she’d implanted in the drones that had infiltrated the creche. 

The datapad’s holoprojector obediently lit up the air in front of him with an array of real-time images: young kittens playing and tumbling together under the watchful eyes of drones and living caretakers, older kittens squinting at their lessons, forming rows to practice their awkward beginner combat forms. In a few more years they would go on to the military academy, exposed to the dangers of cruel superior officers and crueler classmates, but the creche was still a safe place. The caretakers and guardians were all sworn to the protection of the children and would not hesitate to kill an intruder, and there were fierce Galra queens and even some high-ranking concubines in regular attendance, visiting their offspring or volunteering their time as instructors. A few individuals went about with masks and heavy robes to disguise their identity; in the creche all mothers were protected, and no amount of money or torture would persuade a creche attendant to spill secrets about the children or their mothers. Even an Emperor’s bastard child could be raised in safety and secrecy. 

But there was nothing wrong with a little extra security. The spy drones immediately scanned for their usual targets and new windows appeared on top of the others. Mariel’s older children, giggling over their datapads and visibly paying no attention to their teacher, their fuzzy little ears flicking and swivelling as they chattered, and the Blue Paladin’s children from his first litter, napping together in an adorable pile of dark violet fur. They were healthy but small, their coloring different from the other kittens, with a few glittering patches of scales at the edges of their coats. Mariel recognized their attendant; another Istari protege. He relaxed slightly. 

He dressed and decorated himself in what would’ve been unseemly haste for any other occasion, grateful for the drones’ ability to duck and weave around each other to accomplish several tasks at once. His children, knowing exactly what the flurry of preparations meant, yowled loudly in faux heartbreak, pushing away toys and offered bottles and trying to climb up the gravity controlled edges of the couch to protest his leaving. They would be terrors about weaning, he could tell already.

“Hush, hush,” he cajoled in English, tugging closed the folds of the heavy concealing robes he wore and pulling the creche mask down over his face. The eyeslits were too small to see out of but the inside lit up with images projected from the scanners, giving him unobstructed vision and information from an array of sensors. His daughter, predictably, ignored him and howled all the louder, as shouty and indignant as Pidge had ever been when she was little. “I’ll be back soon, I promise.”

The caterwauling continued unabated. Mariel shut the door behind him guiltily and made his way to the lift hub as quickly as he dared, annoyed at his own waddling pace. Soldiers and slaves and drones stood aside to let him proceed, unaware of his identity, their heads bowed respectfully for his status as a mother. Any male that didn’t defer was snarled down by his companions or by any females in the area, and a group of high-ranking officers was chased out of an elevator by a female soldier who had to be nearing her heat by her scent. She did not speak to Mariel, but growled at anyone who attempted to board with them until the elevator reached the level of the creche, where she was clearly not headed herself but choosing to escort him, and Mariel bowed gratefully to her as he exited.

Nothing seemed to be amiss in the creche itself. Mariel drifted through the rooms to speak with attendants and review the public record of security logs, and looked in on all the children. Chele’s kittens were awake now and restless, acting standoffish to their harried minder, and Mariel quietly deduced that Chele had missed his usual time for his daily visit. The Emperor kept his slaves on a close leash, especially with Riva so near to giving birth, but Chele had more mothering instinct than the rest of the paladins combined and was usually dedicated about making time for the creche. 

The war council, it seemed, had run long. 

Mariel stood abruptly and made his excuses as politely as possible, but was interrupted before taking more than a few strides by an attendant bearing a message. A visitor waited for him in the teaching rooms. A male, and an officer. 

Not an arrest squad, he thought. But a soldier who had asked for him by name, in the same classroom with his children. The shift in his scent made the attendant’s eyes narrow, and she inquired delicately, after the way of the Istari, if Mariel would prefer to have the visitor ‘dealt with.’ Males, especially soldiers, were only just tolerated in the creche around so many small, vulnerable kittens and young, vulnerable mothers and also older, extremely dangerous, extremely territorial queens. Ill-intentioned visitors entered the enclave at their own peril, and there were no legal repercussions for creche guardians or broody mothers reacting to a threat in their midst. 

Mariel shook his head, not trusting himself to speak. Agents of the Istari didn’t panic and make rash decisions, either.

The officer had his back to the entrance as Mariel approached, crouched next to one of the high tables where two of Mariel’s sons, Cee and Tema, sat on top of it with their schooling datapads, swinging their little legs in cheerful defiance of the regulations about not climbing on everything. Shocked that the instructor would’ve left a strange male alone with any of the children, Mariel made an inarticulate noise of fury and strode forward, stripping off his mask to call down the creche guardians--

“ASA!” shrieked Cee, the Galra informal equivalent of ‘mama,’ startling the officer and Mariel himself as both of the kittens immediately swarmed up to their feet and leaped fearlessly off the high table the instant they recognized him. The officer snatched them out of mid-air, reflexes combat quick, and Mariel sagged in relief as he recognized the broad uniformed shoulders and familiar half-horrified expression at the kittens’ antics. 

Which was a little unfair, given that Thace had contributed at least half of that recklessness and shocking lack of self-preservation to his sons. 

“You might have sent your name along with that summons,” Mariel said reproachfully, putting a hand down on the table to take some of his weight. “I nearly called the guardians down on you. What are you doing here?”

“Kaja visits,” Tema proclaimed proudly, hanging upside down from Thace’s arm despite his attempts to get both of the squirming brats into a firm, safe hold. “Kaja and Asa visits!”

“My Emperor’s Delight,” Thace said awkwardly, using the formal styling for Mariel’s ridiculous court title as Imperial Concubine and bowing low, which was something of a feat with two wriggling Galra toddlers hanging off him and trying their level best to plunge to their deaths. “I am very sorry to disturb you here--” 

“VISITS,” Cee shrieked, waving his little fists. He was shouty and monosyllabic when excited, the runt of the litter. His sister Neeri and other brother Tarmin were in rotation with another class, as the four of them together had proven to be impossible troublemakers. 

Thace, realizing the futility of conversation with his children using him as a climbing tree, settled both the boys down with their favorite toy, his holographic multi-tool gauntlet, and barely had time to brace himself before Mariel grabbed his cheeks in both hands and yanked him down to eye level, kissing him helplessly. The adrenaline had stirred his body fiercely and he pressed himself against his former lover, his breasts flattened against the hard planes of Thace’s muscles and his distended belly caught between them. Thace’s scent rolled over him, familiar and comforting and provoking all at once.

“What happened?” he whispered urgently in English, forcing the words out between desperate kisses. “I was going to come to you at the regular time, you said it would be too suspicious for us to meet here--”

Thace kissed him back just as fiercely, stroking down his sides inside the robe and curving his palms instinctively over the soft roundness of his pregnancy. Mariel had carried three litters for him and would have carried many more, if Thace had only been able to buy out Mariel’s contract from the harem stables. If it hadn’t been forbidden by his order to bind himself to a permanent companion. If he hadn’t been specifically commanded to take a less conspicuous concubine. If, if, if. 

“The Empress wants you and your sister,” he said quietly. “Some of the generals have leveled a formal accusation of infertility. She cannot stall any longer.”

Mariel swallowed hard. He had been ordered to keep himself hidden from the prying eyes of the public ever since that breeding, keeping Allura’s eggs a secret. Part of her political position was the cultivation of her image as the last Altean, who would, of course, bear inevitably Galra children to her husband or be kept as a trophy wife while Zarkon’s slaves bore his children. Allura’s ability to lay and fertilize hybrid-Altean eggs with the help of a proxy was another story. It could not have been a coincidence that this accusation came only a week or two before the eggs inside him, untouched by Galra DNA, were fully ripe. “I can’t wear creche robes before the court. Will you come back to the room with me?”

Thace hesitated for a fraction of a second, his scent spiking, and Mariel swallowed down the incautious throb of wanting. “To see the children, I mean.” He summoned a weak smile. “You will not be trespassing, I promise. 

Thace’s fingers twitched on the swell of his stomach. “Ulaz has said that you favored the Champion and he you, once upon a time,” he said lowly, the line of his ears unhappy. “I do not wish to be disrespectful to his memory--”

“He’s not _dead._ ” 

Tema and Cee both glanced up at the sharp note in their mother’s voice, whining, and Mariel pulled in a deep, slow breath, reaching along that slender green-gold thread in his mind for balance and serenity. “He’s not dead. My sister and I won’t give up on him, or any of them.”

Katie, somewhere else, echoed him, and this time Mariel felt her fingers close around his as if she were standing right next to him. 

“He is in thrall,” Thace said carefully, tempering, although Mariel knew full well that he was also reminding himself. Riva, the Red Paladin, was the only child of Thace’s former wife Alia, who had been a Blade nearly from childhood herself and out of duty married a boring, respectable, junior level officer with some few, well-hidden dissenting opinions and no passion or backbone to support them. Alia had changed that, changed him, and Thace had joined the Blades upon her death to continue her mission.

And also, secretly, to rescue that single, solitary child she’d left behind, born on an alien planet to another male when Thace and Alia had been unable to conceive together for so many years. Thace had sworn a bloodvow over her ashes that he would protect her son as if it were his own. Right now, less than a dozen decks lay between them and Riva’s quarters, and they both knew that he wore no chains, but he might as well have been locked away in the farthest, deepest prison in the galaxy. His body was within reach, but Zarkon Godbreaker laid claim to his mind.

“For now.” Mariel let himself have one more second in Thace’s arms before stepping back to smooth his robes and re-affix his mask. “Come. Escort me to my rooms, soldier.” 

It was a shorter journey with Thace’s priority access to the lift systems. Mariel led him past the Altean gladiator drones and the checkpoints, already throwing off his heavy, shapeless creche robes as he entered the antechamber to his own bower.

“What happened in the war council?” he asked as soon as they were within the jamming field that would let them speak freely.

Following him and collecting the discarded pieces of clothing out of habit, Thace let his breath hiss through his teeth and told him, summarizing. “Lotor hopes to acquire a paladin. It is rumored he has been secretly experimenting with quintessence. If the Empress and the Emperor are set at each other’s throats over some petty legal infraction, distracted from their domination of the lions and their paladins, and the balance of power shifts…”

“He’ll be squashed by one of the lions before he can take any sort of advantage, more likely.” Mariel remembered the promises of the White Lion and shuddered faintly. “What are your orders?”

Thace was silent. Kolivan had only grudgingly agreed to cooperate with the resistance factions that recognized the “Lion Goddess” as their unifying force, and was still wary of Allura’s private agendas. Alteans were unknown powers, he said. Their human pets were unknown powers, he said, and Thace would someday find himself paying the price for any attachments he formed with one. 

The Blades would not betray their hand for this, just as they hadn’t when Zarkon first captured the Red Paladin, the long lost son of one of their own. Kolivan wanted certain victories. Kolivan might even prefer Lotor Halfblood over the daughter of Alfor, who had ample reason to want the entire Galra race destroyed as her race had been destroyed. 

Mariel’s tiny, clawless alien hand crept into his own, taking the silence for the answer he didn’t want to speak aloud. He tugged Thace forward, ignoring the agitated buzzing of the triangle drones, and drew him over to the gravity couch where his sons and daughter were yowling loudly for his attention, their short fur fluffed in excitement, trying to climb up over the edge of the barrier. Thace went to his knees helplessly, gathering them all close and nuzzling their little faces, his own rumbling purr rising as they squeaked in delight and grabbed at his mane. They smelled of milk and happiness and of their dam, who might very well be executed if he went before the volatile war council with Altean spawn growing in his belly. There were superstitions about Alteans. There were political factions that tolerated Allura’s presence only as the last of her kind, a memento or a trophy for Zarkon; Allura as the mother deity of a reborn race of sorcerous Alteans was another matter entirely. 

“Entertain your children,” Mariel told him quietly, resting one hand on the nape of his neck. Offering comfort to _him._ “I need to get ready for a public appearance.”

“Your sister?”

Mariel reached up to undo the collar clasp at his neck, letting it and his draped curtain of gold chains fall away. “I know where she is.”

*


	4. Chapter 4

***

He was in the desert at night.

Red-brown mountains towered around him, their peaks blocky and weatherbeaten, crumbling. Canyon walls encompassed him like a labyrinth, full of shadowed, winding trails. The dusty, gravelly ground crunching beneath his feet was obsidian-black like a volcanic plain, mirror reflective in the places where it was flat and smooth. It reflected the strangeness of the violet-black sky overhead, the colors of deep space, scattered through with unfamiliar constellations and a huge, burning star in eclipse. 

Wisps of cloud scudded around his ankles in a current he couldn’t feel, flowing forward, while the gusts of winds he could feel caught at his hair and clothes and tugged him in the opposite direction. He leaned into the wind, shading his eyes with his forearm and moving doggedly forward. In the darkness it should have been impossible to see, but the ground was as brilliantly lit with reflected stars as the sky, and he could see the faint, glowing outline of every stone and pebble. The path he followed was narrow, winding between outcroppings of black, mirrored stone. He couldn’t remember if he was walking towards or away from something. Puffs of dust or mist or cloud rose up with each footfall, swirling around his ankles, and he could see the places where a thousand other footprints had been left in the loose ground along the trail, following the same path. He put his hand up against a boulder for balance, and found his fingers resting over a faded, light-limned handprint from some previous traveler. Far above his head, a red star winked and shimmered.

He was wearing sturdy black boots today, and the disheveled remains of his dress uniform, of all things, flapping in the wind. Sometimes when he found himself here he was naked, or wearing shredded, tattered clothing, and he was forced to scavenge for anything that he could find to hide his trail of bloody footprints. Sometimes he remembered that this was all in his head, but the fear of something following him, chasing him, always pushed him to try and cover his tracks. 

His right arm ached fiercely, the way it did sometimes on his bad days. He wanted to sit down, perhaps, and rest for a while, but it was not a good idea to stop moving out here. The landscape looked deserted all the way to the purple black, star-flooded horizon, but that meant nothing in a place where things could appear and disappear in an instant. Silhouettes of the more distant mountain peaks faded and flickered as if uncertain of their own existence. There were great creatures that hunted here, prowling through the reflective landscape and among the stars themselves, and things that hid in the ground, and things that were no more than shadows following behind, insubstantial until they reached out to grab. Ships passed sometimes overhead, or at least the sounds of their engines, blasting past too quickly to identify their origins, but some of them came on slowly and ominously like a thunderhead on the horizon, assessing the land below, the eyes of their searchlights hungry and blinding. Sometimes there were soldiers, human and alien, that appeared and disappeared into the shadows, the march of their tromping boots sending him scuttling into the nearest corner to hide. There were buildings that appeared in clearings and around corners, their open doors beckoning, but they were almost always empty, their hallways blank and echoing, their rooms full of empty chairs, and he threw open every door looking for someone whose face he couldn’t quite remember. 

He remembered these mountains. Not as they were, but as they should have been. The sky overhead should have been a brilliant, endless blue, curving from horizon to horizon like the broken sphere of a pottery bowl. The earth should have been a mosaic of golds and reds and browns, striped by shadows from the mountains and faint, dusty game trails. There should have been heat mirages shimmering in the distance, and the sun should have felt like a hammer on an anvil, a physical force bearing down on his skin. He remembered the trickle of sweat between his shoulderblades and the hot, dusty air coating the inside of his throat when he swallowed. He remembered the sensation of slipping and sliding down soft dirt trails, loose pebbles following him like an avalanche, his palms catching on the rough canyon walls. He remembered how cool it was in the mouth of the caves, inches away from punishing sunlight.

There was something here with him.

It sounded like far off thunder, echoing off the bare face of the rock and rattling small pebbles along the ground, but it was not an oncoming storm. It was regular, rhythmic; the steady, horrifying tread of something impossibly huge moving through the canyons. 

There was no good in running. He couldn’t afford to slip and fall and start a landslide, or draw the eye with sudden darting movements. He climbed as steadily as he could, watching his feet, watching the cliffs for any sign of movement or long, looming shadows against the stars, his heart pounding. Little showers of pebbles sounded like an avalanche to him, giving away his position. He pushed himself, and he was desperately, desperately afraid. 

He saw the flower only out of the corner of his eye. It was a tiny, dusty thing, a solitary bud on a vine clinging doggedly to the side of the rocks. It could have been any color underneath all the dust, but Shiro thought it might have been white. He paused, uncertain; there were no flowers in these false mountains. Strange things, incongruous things, were almost always traps or omens or markers, for good or for ill. 

He looked closer and saw it: the thin curling body of the vine itself disappeared into a slender cleft of shadow among the rocks. A cave. An easy place to become trapped or cornered, but he was too vulnerable out here without any cover. He ducked into the dark, cool mouth, flattening himself against the stones as impossibly loud, impossibly heavy footfalls echoed through a nearby canyon, shaking the ground and rattling small pebbles with every step. 

He could see something huge moving through the pillars of rocks, something that gleamed like steel and obsidian, its massive head swinging this way and that as it hunted. Its snorting breath was a furnace. It was alive and not alive, gears whirring and churning as it searched the canyons, but it growled like a living creature, its tail lashing. It raised its head and roared, shatteringly loud, making the rocks around him quiver. It _wanted,_ violently. He ducked away, flinching, easing himself further into the cave’s concealing darkness, crawling on his hands and knees.

The air grew colder almost immediately, a damp, pervasive chill soaking into his thin uniform and making his arm ache. It was nearly too dark to see, but he felt like the ceiling was lower the further he went, an oppressive presence making him want to duck his head. He felt like an animal burrowing in the earth, mindlessly afraid, helpless if a predator ever took it into its mind to dig him out of his meager shelter.

 _Shiro,_ something whispered, a faint, tinny echo like a dying radio. It sounded like it had come from the cave mouth, and he hesitated, but another shower of loose dirt from the steps of the hunting giant outside stung him into motion again, scrabbling further into the cave. His groping hands scraped over loose gravel and sand until there was suddenly cold, smooth steel beneath his fingers, the grooves and rivets of floor plating, and when he jerked his head up he could see the silhouettes of cell bars striped across the open mouth of the cave. 

It was no longer a cave. He was on the Galra prison ship.

His breath steamed in the cold air. He was freezing, and weak, and horribly, miserably alone. The awful neon glare of the bars and the overhead lights in the corridor didn’t quite reach into the dark corners, at once too dark and too bright to let him sleep. In the distance, he could hear the steady tromp tromp tromp of the sentries and he knew that they would be coming to his cell soon. Their patterns were regular. They would shock him and subdue him and then drag him out, prepare him for the arena. It would not matter if he fought them or lay on the floor like dead weight, if he was sick or bloody or faint from hunger. They would take him either way. They would prod him like an animal with their stun sticks, chase him ahead, or put a collar and leash on him and drag him by the neck. He curled into himself, lying on his side on the hard steel floor, clutching at the tattered rags of the purple shirt that hung off his shoulders.

This wasn’t real. He had escaped from this place. The stinging welts on his back from the energy whips of the guards were not real, the bandaged stump of his arm was not real, the awful gnawing fear in his belly wasn’t real. He had gotten out. He had escaped and stood out under a blue sky. He closed his eyes and concentrated, sorting through the disconnected jumble of his memories.

The pristine white corridors of the Castle of Lions. Bloody handprints smeared on the walls, streaks from grasping fingers on a console. His harsh breathing as he hunted his prey, fleeing from him in her gauzy white nightgown like a ghost. He gritted his teeth, hounded by the voices in his head telling him to finish it, find her, finish it, _finish it,_ his hand clenched around the handle of the dagger buried between his ribs. He turned a corner into bright blinding lights-- 

The spotlights of the Arena beating down on him as he stood over the body of his opponent. The frenzied, cheering crowd, howling for violence, howling the name that wasn’t his. His arms, both of them still flesh, covered in steaming, stinging blood to the elbow, his muscles trembling, the horror of what he’d done rising inside him like a scream, knowing the other prisoners had seen, knowing _he_ had seen-- 

The shuttle launch. A different kind of frenzied, cheering crowd in the distance, waving banners and yelling his name. Sunlight beating down on the asphalt. Heat mirages shimmering on the runway, and a hand tugging playfully at the front of his flightsuit, leaning in close enough to kiss. The boy he’d become a murderer for, smiling at him, young and confident and laughing. Unknowing. Unscathed. 

Garrison. The barracks. The boy he’d made promises to, sneaking out onto the roof under the starry sky. Slender hips and violet eyes. A stubborn mouth. Wind whipping through his hair, tearing his voice away, arms clasped tight around his waist, the thrill of pure speed as they raced along a winding road in the desert, engines thrumming beneath them, the only two people in the universe at that moment. A hand on his shoulder, gripping carefully. A voice calling his name, the sound turning radio tinny and distorted by the end, like someone fiddling with a tuning dial.

 _Shiro? Shiro?_

He took a breath. 

He was in the desert at night. Red-brown mountains towered in the distance, their peaks blocky and weatherbeaten, crumbling. Gravel and black sand crunched beneath his feet, and the constellations overhead in the violet-black sky were more familiar, twinkling in recognizable constellations. His heart leapt; he could see Polaris, and where the burning star had been before he could see the moon, Earth’s moon, shining silver and enormous, so bright every individual crack and crater and scar was visible on its skin. He didn’t recognize his surroundings, but that wasn’t important. He could see the glow on the horizon, a beacon against the dark rim of the bluffs. A town, the Garrison base, a solitary highway gas station with its floodlights, anything: it was civilization. It was people, his people. 

He had broken into a staggering run before realizing he’d even made the decision to move. The footing was poor, the sand slipping and dissolving under him, and he stumbled drunkenly this way and that, trying to keep his balance as he ran. The wind pushed against him, catching at his clothes and his hair like insubstantial hands. He kept his eyes up, fixed on that glow of light like a lantern, and nearly went to his knees as he stumbled over an outcropping, arms pinwheeling to keep his balance. He shifted to the side, looking for a more level tract of ground, and jerked his head up to keep his bearings. The light was getting brighter, and somehow more red, almost fiery. He slowed, confused, until he heard the noise: engines.

It broke over the top of the mountain bluffs in a ball of fire, the burning husk of the Galra escape pod trailing plumes of noxious black smoke. He stared at it in horror, not understanding. That was the pod he’d flown. That was him, somehow, up in that cockpit surrounded by alarms and smoke and hellish red lights, only semi-conscious and terrified, his fingers locked around the unresponsive controls like they’d been cemented there, but he was also on the ground, frozen in place, watching the burning ship head towards him like a missile. He could hear the groaning and screaming of stressed metal, pieces breaking away and flying off in every direction like miniature comets, smoking and flaming. It was heading straight for him, its nose pulling down like it was following a homing beacon. Debris pattered the sand around his feet. It was going to hit exactly where he stood. It was going to obliterate him. 

He couldn’t run. He was himself in two places, panting like a terrified animal in the cockpit, staring out the cracked and heat-blackened windshield at the human figure standing there like a target, a toy-size shape growing larger and larger as the ship plummeted. He was hallucinating, he was pinned in his seat by the harness straps, watching the ground rush up at him, feeling the ship falling apart around him as the wind tore away its plating and whistled through the gaps, he was standing petrified in the desert as the sand started to swirl and howl around him like a dust devil, stinging his skin. He was at ground zero for the bombs they used to test out here, he was at the epicenter of a tornado’s reaching, blind funnel, fumbling to connect with the earth. The stench of fumes and burning metal rose in his nostrils until he choked on it. The ship’s fiery bulk expanded until it was the only thing he could see, blocking out the night sky and the mountains. The shrieking roar of the engines was deafening as it bore down on him, and he clapped his hands over his ears, the noise vibrating in his very bones, shaking him to pieces.

Memory skipped. He was staring up at the steel and plastic-wrapped ceiling of a clean room, strapped down to a medical gurney. The drugs in his system made him numb and disconnected, dulling the pain of his injuries and wrapping his brain in soft cotton. He remembered, vaguely, that Garrison soldiers had cut him loose from the wreckage of the crashed pod, had shouted questions at him, their heavy gear distorting their voices, and he’d stared back at them wild-eyed, mute, a trapped animal squinting and flinching away from their lights, chest heaving in panic. They kept their rifles trained on him, ringing him, the barrels close enough that he could smell metal and oil, and he could hear their radios crackling with stern, aggressive voices barking orders. It sounded like alien language, almost, the same cadence as the Galra guards. He knew he was supposed to recognize the words being hurled at him, that his inability to respond was making the situation worse, but his brain refused to process anything more than loud noises and enemies surrounding him. 

He’d bared his teeth and snapped at the first soldier that reached for him. Heavy gloves grabbed his jaw and pressed his head against the cockpit chair, holding him down, a rifle barrel shoved into his cheek while the others approached with knives and welding torches to cut him loose. The stink of burning plastic and steel filled his nose, reminding him horribly of the Druids’ tables, and he could hear something making an awful whining, whimpering noise before realizing it was himself, trying to jerk away from the torch. A soldier holding his head tried to calm him, making shushing noises the way one would for an animal and stroking a gloved thumb across his skin, but even that was horrifying to him, like the Galra surgeons lying to him cheerfully that it would be over quickly and he could stop making so much racket. The second he felt the harness give way he tried to throw himself out of the chair but what felt like dozens of hands grabbed at him, holding him back, and his legs twisted strangely underneath him, betraying him with weakness. The soldiers held his arms, knotted their fingers in his clothes and hair and half-carried, half-dragged him outside, his feet faltering underneath him, where there were medics in hazmat suits waiting with more restraints and a gurney. 

They weren’t necessary. The first wash of dusty, familiar Earth air over him, expanding in his lungs as he stumbled out into the open and took a great, gulping breath, cut his legs out from under him as effectively as a blade. The moon was huge on the horizon, a great silver-white eye fixed on him, and far away he could see the familiar pattern of the base lights strung out in the darkness like jewels, creating a halo of light pollution against the darker sky. Beyond the ring of floodlights, the ground disappeared into blue and black shadows. He collapsed to his knees and dug his fingers deep into the cool crumbling sand, only vaguely aware of the tears streaming down his face. 

The medics were gentler with him, snapping at the soldiers to give him room, but no less wary, keeping hands on him to prevent him from moving as they laid down the gurney and negotiated his uncooperative weight onto it. Fingers pressed against his neck and spine, searching for injuries, and they tried to shine their little penlights into his eyes, wanting him to follow the movement. He closed his eyes against them, overwhelmed. They stank like plastic and chemicals, and he didn’t want their cold, stinging disinfecting cloths dabbing and pressing at his cuts. They asked him questions, too, and spoke to him calmly, explaining what they were doing as the gurney rattled over the uneven ground, until he finally forced the breath out of his lungs in the shape of his name. His throat was dry and painful from screaming, his voice a rusty croak.

They heard him but didn’t listen. They didn’t understand about the Galra, about the weapon, about how much danger the entire planet was in. They asked questions that didn’t matter, they were worried about quarantine procedures and about his arm. He could see himself transforming in their eyes from a fellow human to a _problem,_ from rational Garrison comrade to someone yelling nonsense about aliens and invasions and super-weapons. In the end they strapped him down as indifferently as the Galra had, speaking to each other over his head instead of to him, and they ignored his struggles and his protests as they administered sedatives. Numbness washed over him, a gray cage to dull his senses and separate him from rational thought. 

A faceless guard wearing a dusty flower tucked incongruously into a breast pocket shifted as their radio squawked and clicked, broadcasting static. Shiro thought he heard something underneath the white noise, a voice murmuring his name.

Ghosts, he thought vaguely. Ghosts on the radio.

“I said put him _under,_ ” someone snapped.

“We’re trying, sir!”

In the distance, he thought he heard thunder. 

His heartrate spiked. The monitors beeped faster as technicians ran for more needles, for more bags of chemicals to pour into his veins. 

_Hang on, Shiro,_ whispered the radio, whining and clicking. _Stay awake. Stay with me._

“We need to move him. Prep for transport.” 

“He’s still awake--”

“Then triple the dose!” 

Staying awake wasn’t under his control. Hands held his face, turning it to expose his neck. He didn’t feel the needle’s prick but he felt the cold wash of chemicals sliding under his skin, his traitorous heart pumping them through his system. The radio clicked and clicked and clicked. 

When he woke again, he was still on the gurney, still staring up at a plastic and steel ceiling. The smell of disinfectant was strong in his nose. There were even more straps this time, and someone had thoughtfully handcuffed his Galra arm to the metal arm of the gurney. 

There was a little white cat sitting on the end of the gurney between his feet. It looked at him with mismatched eyes, one gold and one blue, and yawned widely, displaying its little white teeth and little pink tongue. He stared at it, suddenly feeling cold, and turned his gaze resolutely back to the ceiling. There were some things that it was better to ignore. 

He could hear the scientists and techs arguing quietly over his head. They wanted to move him again, to a more secure location, some place they could guard and fortify. They wanted to study his arm. They cut him out of his prisoner rags while he was still firmly strapped down, peeling the fabric free from his torso in strips, salivating over the possibility of alien material, and left him bare to the waist. They wanted blood and skin and hair and even bone marrow samples, as the techs operating portable scanners exclaimed in disbelief over the inhuman density of his bones, and they made noises of muffled horror behind their facemasks when they lifted the cut edges of the clinging bodysuit away from his waist and hips. He knew exactly what they were looking at. The gladiator cage he wore beneath his clothes was strong as steel but transparent, hiding nothing. 

He would have cringed away if he could. He would have snarled and bared his teeth. Their gloved hands poked and prodded at him, pulling at the buckles and straps of the chastity device, discussing it like it was a fucking intellectual puzzle. They peeled his bodysuit down to his hips, chattering about how they might cut the cage loose. They wanted to see exactly what was underneath. They wanted to take pictures of it, they wanted to see if it had been grafted onto his body. They wanted, obscenely, to know what it looked like when erect, and one of them slid a cold, gloved hand down his hip.

His response was automatic, ingrained reflex. The Champion of the Emperor’s arena, prisoner 117-9875, clenched his fist and activated his arm. He snapped the chain of the handcuffs like string. He burned through the straps holding him down. He burned through the hazmat suits of the technicians. He burned through the flesh and bone of his tormentors, the last one choking as Shiro slid his hand free of his bowels, and it wasn’t a human scientist anymore, it was an alien gladiator, its gore-encrusted weapon falling from nerveless fingers. He stood trembling in the middle of a dozen broken bodies, alien and mechanical. Broken equipment sparked and smoked in the wake of his rampage. There were more scientists in hazmat suits loitering at the fringes of the room, undisturbed and apparently untroubled, but he could see that they had pupil-less yellow eyes behind their gas masks, and their low, murmuring voices were insectoid, chittering sounds. They wrote on clipboards with clawed hands and nodded over results on cracked, blood-splattered viewscreens as if nothing at all had happened. 

The cat was also watching him, perched on the side of an overturned utility cart. As it saw him looking, it lifted up a little white paw and began to wash it, as if bored. 

“Excellent, excellent,” Haggar whispered in his ear, her long fingered hands closing over his heaving shoulders. He jerked away, twisting around and slashing his arm across the space she’d occupied, but she was no longer behind him. The other Druids didn’t even look up. 

“You’ve made great progress,” her voice purred from nowhere, and then she was across the room, standing in the front of the glass door of the exit, hands folded sedately within her sleeves. “There is no more hesitation when you attack, and you strike to kill. I thought we would have more difficulty awakening your bloodlust, but it’s been there all along, hasn’t it. Your species is not so civilized.”

He charged at her, his Galra hand flaring bright, but she was gone the instant his fist would have made contact. He snarled in wordless fury, chasing after her through the open door that should have led out into the plastic wrapped tunnel entryway and then outside. She was laughing at him, the noise echoing from everywhere in the empty tunnel at once, and he flung aside the heavy, hanging strips of plastic at the entrance--

\--only to find himself in the clean room again. The same domed ceiling. The same broken bodies on the floor, arcs of blood and ichor on the walls. The abandoned gurney with its burned straps, monitors beeping softly in the background, oblivious. He panted raggedly, and the body on the end of his activated hand slid limply down to the ground, clutching at his arm where it had rammed straight through his chest. 

“Ch...champion...” Ulaz murmured weakly, yellow eyes wide with surprise. His grip loosened on Shiro’s forearm, and he slid free with a horrible wet noise, already gone. In death, his long limbs sprawled bonelessly and thick purple blood pooling sluggishly at the corner of his slack mouth, he looked like any other Galra. 

Off to the side, Haggar was speaking calmly to a human man in Garrison uniform that Shiro recognized from his former life, Iverson’s elusive superior. More scientists puttered around behind them, bending their heads over datapads and adjusting knobs on broken equipment. Their full body hazmat suits bunched and slouched around them, hiding their shapes as they moved, and Shiro couldn’t tell if they were human or Galra or something else entirely behind the smoky, tinted faceplates. He felt dizzy; he could no longer tell if the clean room was the one he remembered from the crash or if this was a Druid lab. 

“You’re sure of his memories?” the man was asking, frowning down at Ulaz’s corpse. “The Marmora zealots are usually more cautious about revealing themselves.”

Shiro saw Haggar turn to look at him, the hood of her cloak not quite concealing her satisfied expression, and he couldn’t find it in himself to move as she drifted closer without ever seeming to take a step. She laid a proprietary hand on his burning arm, and the energy did not seem to touch her. “Our Champion knows the traitor’s name and face. When he sees him again, the compulsion will take over. He will not rest until he has hunted down his prey.”

The Garrison officer looked pleased. He looked less human now, and more like something taller and bonier shaping itself in a parody of human form, stuffing itself into human clothes. “And how many names can he hold within his fragile little heart?”

“As many as you require, of course.” Haggar’s fingers were cool along Shiro’s cheek. “There will be command words, and you may arrange his targets by priority. Who would you like him to kill first?”

The Garrison officer smiled like a shark. 

Haggar’s fingers slid into his hair. Shiro shut his eyes, waiting for the pain to come, for the lightning to ignite in his bones. He was on the table, he was in the arena, he was on Earth, but he was always in her hands. There was nothing he could do. There was nothing he could do to stop it. 

_Shiro,_ the radio whispered. It clicked twice and then crackled loudly, loud enough that he jerked, and opened his eyes. 

He was standing in front of the gurney he’d freed himself from. Haggar was no longer in front of him, and the victims of his attack lay slumped on the floor, dead or dying. He couldn’t tell if they were human or alien any longer, they were just heaps of limbs and clothes and weapons. Druids in their customary dark robes stood in the shadows of the room, watching him with burning yellow eyes behind their masks. The cat was gone, too, or at least out of sight. 

And Keith was striding across the destroyed room to him, sword bayard in hand. He was taller, his hair longer; no longer the cadet that Shiro had left behind with his regulation cut and his sullen expression and his feral cat affection. He looked like a hero in the gleaming armor of the Red Paladin, strong and determined. He could have worn a cape. His armor was so freshly polished that it shone, nearly glowing against the lesser white of the clean room’s sterile colors. 

This was not what had happened. Shiro had been only barely conscious for this, his eyes refusing to open, latching onto familiar voices and scents, too drugged to stand on his own. He had been strapped to a gurney. It had not happened like this. 

Shiro watched him come warily, his breath shallow, knowing himself to be covered in blood, fresh from his kills. Haggar was standing just behind his shoulder like a shadow, something that Keith either couldn’t see or was ignoring. Shiro felt the weight of her attention, felt her fingers twitch, and so did the fingers on his Galra arm.

No, he said silently. No, never. He’d rip off the arm first. 

“Shiro,” Keith said again, softer, reaching to cup his cheek. Shiro turned his face into the touch, breathing in _young, male,_ and _protective, territorial male._ He breathed in grief, and desert sand, motor oil, and the night wind. 

“Keith,” he said, or tried to say, the word coming out as a breathless animal whine. His tongue had forgotten how to shape words. 

“I’m getting you out of here,” Keith told him, low and burning and furious, and it was every hallucination he’d ever had; a rescue, an impossible rescue, someone that couldn’t have been there appearing to save him. He had dreamed of Keith in the cells. He’d shouted himself hoarse thinking he’d seen his face in the crowds, in another cell, being marched along the hallway, and he’d had nightmares where Keith had stood in the open maw of his doorway and looked down on him in his chains and muzzle in disgust, and turned away. 

You’re their creature now, he’d said. This is where you belong. 

Sometimes it wasn’t Keith. Sometimes it was other friends he’d known, peers and classmates or instructors, random people from his childhood. Sometimes it was the Holts, staring at him accusingly or reaching for him, yelling his name, trying to fight their way to him through a sweeping tide of aliens and soldiers moving the other way. Sometimes it was Matt being torn away from him, swallowed up, no matter how Shiro tried to hold onto him, and the Druids closing in around him, their masked faces leaning down over him like a ring of predators, inspecting his reactions. Sometimes it was Keith as he’d never been, sliding soft and willing onto Shiro’s cot, his uniform jacket pushed off his shoulders, his lips parted, and Shiro would roll to face the wall, hating himself for this, hating the ceaseless throbbing ache below his waist that he wasn’t allowed to relieve. Keith wasn’t here, he’d tell himself. Keith wasn’t here, Keith couldn’t be here. It was just his mind playing tricks.

It would be easy to dispel the illusion, came the sudden, traitorous thought, if he shoved his arm right through it. Then he would know. Then he would be sure. 

“I’m here,” Keith whispered in front of him, and ducked under Shiro’s arm to pull it over his shoulder, wrapping his own arm around Shiro’s waist, oblivious to any danger. He was warm and solid, almost shockingly so, and strong. He’d grown up while Shiro was off in space losing his mind. He didn’t seem to notice that he was getting blood all over himself from Shiro’s skin and clothing, he didn’t seem to notice that Shiro’s shadow had yellow eyes. “It’s all right now, Shiro. I’ve got you. Everything’s going to be okay. Just stay with me.” 

The last couple sentences seemed to echo, a second voice speaking underneath Keith’s as the radio clicked and hummed. A sharp scent rose above the smell of burnt plastic and electrical destruction, above the coppery tang of blood; an incongruous waft of damp soil and green, growing things, like a forest breeze.

_Stay with me. You remember what happens next._

This was how it had happened: the drugs, fogging his mind. Echoing thunder in the distances. The sound of a fight in the room, and him unable to do more than slit his eyes open at the blurry silhouette hovering over him. The straps binding him to the gurney sliced free. Voices in his ear, one familiar and three not, arguing with each other, sharp with adrenaline and anxiety. Keith’s voice, encouraging him, telling him that he was going to be okay, his grip firm and possessive and protective. Wind rushing through his hair, the throb of engines. Keith arguing over his head, low and intense, and then a shift in gravity, his deadweight being poured onto his feet. Sand and gravel crunched underneath him. The voices of strangers, coaxing him to walk, and the desert air around them cooling rapidly. Wooden steps leading up to a porch. The sound of a screen door swinging shut behind him, uneven linoleum and carpet softening his footfalls. Musty smells and walls baked in sunlight. 

Someone tall and broad-shouldered was guiding his steps, strong enough to take most of Shiro’s weight with an arm wrapped around his waist, but he smelled like a stranger, and nervous too, anxiety pouring off him in waves until it made Shiro dizzy. It wasn’t Keith. It wasn’t anyone he knew. He shook his head, low-grade panic trying to ignite through the drugs, and halted, pushing himself away from his supporter while strange voices rose up around him like startled birds.

“Wait, Shiro, wait, calm down--”

“Shit, don’t let him fall, grab him--!”

“Don’t yell around him, you idiots--”

He opened his eyes. 

He was in a tiny, dated kitchen, halfway between the front entrance and a cramped living room. His feet were planted in a combat stance, his breath ragged, his false arm glowing and crackling with a horribly familiar violet light, reeking of ozone. He _hurt,_ and that was familiar. He was defending himself, and that was familiar. 

Three teenagers, strangers, were staring at him with mixed expressions of horror and alarm. A lanky boy with brown hair, the one closest to him with his hands raised placatingly, the tallest boy in yellow who was edging behind his companion like he was afraid, and a third, shorter, with glasses, staring at him with an awful expression--

“Matt?” he croaked out, and the third boy flinched like he’d been struck. There was something wrong about it, something wrong about all of it, the voices and scents and sounds, Matt couldn’t be here, if this was Earth, unless this was another dream, another Druid trick, and they were just toying with his mind again.

“Whoa, whoa, hey.”

That was the lanky boy, edging closer. Shiro growled at him instinctively, trembling, wavering on his feet, and the boy’s eyes widened, but he didn’t back away. 

“I’m Lance,” he said instead, trying to sound calm and soothing and only partly succeeding. He was also trying not to stare at the light radiating from Shiro’s arm. “We’re-- uh, you don’t know us, but we’re here to help, okay. I’m Lance, that’s Hunk, and that’s Pidge. Matt was one of the guys on your crew, right? He’s not here. It’s just us here. And Keith, he’s outside getting the bike under cover, he’s coming right back.” 

His expression must have shifted at Keith’s name, because the boy-- Lance-- nodded vigorously, and kept going, babbling nervously. “Right, Keith, you remember Keith? He rescued you-- we all rescued you. You’re safe here. Nothing’s going to hurt you.”

Shiro stared at him mutely. That was the biggest lie he’d ever had anyone say to his face, and Lance had said it earnestly. 

“Shiro?”

He shut his eyes. His head was ringing, his muscles aching as the sedatives and painkillers wore off, and he felt sick and confused and exhausted and overwhelmed. The noise from his arm whined and guttered, flaring in erratic little bursts like a dying battery. The kitchen floor felt like it was rolling under his feet.

“Shiro?”

Cadets, he realized muzzily. Garrison cadets in civilian clothes. Old enough to have been enrolled when he was still there, before he’d left Earth. Maybe he’d met them. Maybe he’d guest lectured in a class, maybe they’d attended the launch event. Maybe they only knew him as a name on a news broadcast. They might have been Keith’s year-mates, although Keith clearly wasn’t familiar with them. That matched the shards and fragments he remembered. Keith didn’t make friends easily. Keith didn’t get along with his peers, didn’t handle gossip well, didn’t know how to accept compliments. Keith needed people that would reach for him, because he didn’t know how to reach out first.

Movement. He could smell Garrison soap, Garrison detergent, nostalgic things that made him ache to remember, and also the hint of something incongruously tropical, like hothouse flowers, and when he dragged his eyes open Lance was much closer, reaching out tentatively to Shiro’s terrifying, glowing hand, close enough to feel the heat radiating off of it. The other two cadets were no longer behind him. Shiro didn’t know how long he’d stood there with his eyes closed. 

Lance was breathing too quickly, the glow of Shiro’s activated arm reflected in his eyes. Afraid. Inexperienced, uncertain, and still reaching out. 

“Take my hand,” Lance told him anyway, bravely. “Come sit down. I know you don’t feel good, I know you don’t feel safe. This is all-- really super fucked up, I know. But you’re going to fall over if you stay here, and then Keith’ll be upset that you fell over in his kitchen.” His hand inched closer to Shiro’s. His fingers were steady, despite his fear. Shiro’s were shaking. 

“Take my hand, and come sit down on the couch, okay? We’ll go slow. Let me help you. I.” He swallowed hard as Shiro’s arm flared and flickered, their fingers only inches apart. “I want to help you.”

The neon light faded away a second before their fingers laced together, safe, inert. Lance let out a little breath like he’d been punched in the stomach, and looked up at Shiro smiling, his entire face alight. 

Lance held Shiro’s hand as they made it, step by hobbling step, to the couch in the shack’s tiny excuse for a living room, Keith appearing like a whirlwind from the side door to assist, blowing and sweaty from shoving the hoverbike under a covered shelter. Hunk and Pidge would finish the job, he said, his gaze locked onto Shiro’s, too tightly focused to even protest Lance’s presence. Lance held Shiro’s hand as Keith brought him water and blankets and a spare shirt and a bucket if he felt nauseated during the night, and dragged a chair over, stubbornly intending to keep watch, and the two of them bickered over who would stay out in the living room with Shiro and who would be exiled to the shack’s tiny bedroom with Pidge and Hunk. Lance held Shiro’s hand as Keith checked him for injuries, and Lance held his hand while Shiro tried and failed to stay awake, slowly listing sideways. He drifted off as Keith was still talking quietly, sinking against the worn, comfortable couch cushions. 

He woke several times in panic as the sedatives wore off, jerking up from the couch and the pillows in a cold sweat, a shout trying to escape his throat. Keith was there instantly, an indistinct silhouette in the dark that might have been terrifying except for his voice, familiar and comforting, telling Shiro that he was safe here, that he’d been rescued, that he was back on Earth. He’d come home. 

He said Shiro’s name like it hurt him. He’d been confident and in control earlier, speaking to the others, but now he sounded scraped raw, as abused as Shiro felt. In the morning, he would hear about Keith being dismissed from Garrison and know it for his own fault, all their progress together stunted, all of Keith’s accomplishments at Garrison reset to zero. In the moment, all he could think about was Keith sitting alone in an empty room in the barracks, enduring, waiting like a war bride.

Shiro reached for him blindly. Their fingers laced together, palm to palm and clutching tight, and Keith was on his knees next to the couch, bowed over him, his unruly bangs hanging down. Shiro gripped the back of his neck with his false hand, hating to touch Keith with it but unwilling to let go, their foreheads pressed together, finally, finally _believing_ that he’d been rescued, and felt hot tears slide down his cheeks for the second time that night. 

Keith wasn’t a crier. He carried his pain around like a hot stone in his belly, contracting around it, eyes dry and guarded. His breath was ragged in Shiro’s ear, his heart beating fast, and Shiro whispered his name until Keith twisted his head against him in misery and put a hand over his mouth, silencing him. Shiro slid his hand into Keith’s fine soft hair, feeling the weight of it across the sensors of his prosthetic, and then made a fist of it, gripping hard, and Keith’s breath hitched on the bare edge of a sob. His hand slipped from Shiro’s mouth to his chest, pressing over his beating heart. Not pressing, clawing. His nails dug into Shiro’s chest.

“Are you real?” Keith choked out, soft and ragged and terrible, the words clawing out of him. “Are you really here? Because I can’t-- I _can’t_ \--”

Under cover of darkness, it was easier to cover his hesitation. Shiro felt the weight of every hand that had touched him in the last year of captivity, laying heavily on him, compressing his organs and gripping his limbs. The Druids had taken pieces and chunks out of him on their tables, and put other things in. His blood wasn’t human blood, his bones weren’t human bones. His shadow had eyes. The fingers of his false hand twitched.

“Yes,” he lied helplessly. “Yes.” 

They didn’t say anything else. There wasn’t anything else to say, not at three am in the desert in a dark, rickety house in the company of sleeping strangers. They breathed together in the dark until Shiro’s exhaustion swept him under again, his hand going slack in Keith’s grip.

The third time Shiro woke it wasn’t to Keith’s voice, because Keith had fallen asleep slumped next to the couch, his head pillowed on folded arms on the edge of Shiro’s cushions, and the moonlight slanting through the dirty windows had shown him the ghost of Matt Holt perched uncomfortably on a metal folding chair, staring at him.

But it shook its head violently when he whispered Matt’s name. It wasn’t a ghost, it just looked like one, an eerie miniature copy of Matt sitting in the dark. Another boy with amber eyes and glasses, unruly hair and the dark rings of an insomniac. He beckoned Shiro outside to the porch, the screen door creaking softly. He beckoned Shiro out onto the sand. In the moonlight he looked even more insubstantial, his fists clenched at his sides as if to keep himself from reaching out, or throwing a punch. He was a pale echo of Matt, the same spiky hair and determined chin and round frames, cast in silver by the moon instead of gold. 

“Do you remember me?” the boy asked abruptly, his voice choked with something, and Shiro had to shake his head. He remembered Matt. He remembered Matt at the shuttle launch, Matt in his school uniform, Matt pouring over pages of data with that little crease in his brow. 

“But you remember him. Where is he, Shiro?”

Matt in the prison cells. Matt curled in on himself, crying silently so the guards wouldn’t hear. Matt being led back from the Druids’ care, his eyes huge and wounded, his mouth clamped shut, refusing to speak about it. 

“Did you leave him there?” the boy asked in a terrible voice, and Shiro jerked in surprise. That wasn’t what happened. Pidge had never asked him that. Their conversation had been interrupted by Lance, who had woken up to find them both missing and shooed them both back inside, threatening to wake Keith up, telling Pidge to have five seconds of fucking patience, couldn’t he wait until the morning to interrogate someone.

The old, broken radio on the porch, the one grown through with vines, clicked softly. If a voice came though, it was too small and muffled to hear. Lance did not appear from the screen door. 

“Did you leave him there, Shiro? Did you?”

“I…”

“You did. Would you have left Keith?”

 _No._ He opened his mouth to deny it, stung and horrified, but there was a sudden, searing pain in his side, a burst of warm wetness soaking into his clothes like a punishment for the lie he was about to tell. He bit down on a cry and looked down, seeing himself in the Black Paladin armor now rather than the Galra prisoner uniform. The hilt of the transformed bayard knife protruding from between his ribs was bright white, nearly glowing, and he could feel the raw burning of its energy blade inside him. He couldn’t pull it out. If he pulled it out, he would bleed to death. If its owner recalled it, he would bleed to death. 

“Shiro?”

That was Lance, suddenly, rescuing him as he reeled, shoring up Shiro’s other side as he and Keith half-walked, half-carried Shiro to the waiting red hoverbike. Except they were in the Castle of Lions, somehow, the floor underneath and the walls surrounding them all gleaming white and silver, but the air above them was open to that same violet-black sky, the shadowed star in eclipse huge and burning like a great black eye. The desert shack was gone. Pidge was gone. Lance was in his undersuit, distractingly half-zipped, and Shiro wanted to stop, to pull the sides of the fabric together to hide the vulnerable hollow of his throat and the tease of his clavicle. Lance thought he knew what he was doing. Lance flirted with alien girls and got himself tied to space trees and kidnapped by mermaids and looked at Shiro like he hung the moon, and thought he was ready for what he pretended he wasn’t advertising.

The comm unit in his helmet crackled and hummed, buzzing wildly in his ear. It sounded like someone scanning for frequencies. If he could have managed it, he would have pulled the helmet off.

Instead he gritted his teeth against the river of fire in his side and forced a smile on his face. He couldn’t tell Lance what had happened. He could never tell any of them what had happened, and he knew with that same cold-blooded certainty that Lance would respond well to a smile and his tone of voice and a hint of compliment. “I’m fine. Just a little tired. You wore me out with that training.”

Right on cue, Lance smiled back in delight, his ocean-and-tropical-fruit scent warming in shy pleasure. “Yeah? Well, I was going easy on you. It’s not fair to beat up on an old man, right?”

“I’m not an old man,” Shiro replied dutifully, ignoring the way the blood creeping down his side was making the floor underneath them slick and red with footprints. He was starting to feel cold and faintly sick.

“There’s no shame in admitting it! You can’t be perfect all the time. And you know what, I just going to go ahead and say that it’s okay that you left Keith and I behind on Zarkon’s flagship.”

Shiro flinched violently, although Lance’s tone hadn’t changed. He looked at him and saw, to his horror, that Lance wasn’t wearing his paladin suit any longer but slave silks, gauzy and expensive, fluttering around his dark, lovely skin, and he wore the jewelled collar and harness ensemble of an Imperial concubine. He had been painted with Galra symbols, with the Emperor’s symbols, and his mouth was pink and wet. He pressed against Shiro’s side knowingly, all his bony angles transmuted to softness, his slender body yielding and experienced. He was brazen about pulling off Shiro’s helmet, letting it dangle from his fingertips and then drop, leaning in.

“You left us there,” he whispered in Shiro’s ear, hot breath stirring the fine hairs. “You left us there with him.” 

Shiro wrenched away, clutching at his side as the motion made agony flare up. Lance looked down at him remotely, like a stranger, like someone who had expected a disappointment and wasn’t surprised at all. The jewelry he wore and the cosmetics that shaded his skin made him look like a statue, beautiful and unforgiving. And Keith…

It wasn’t Keith. It was Matt, bloody and bruised, in the filmy strips of loose fabric that was the Galra equivalent of a paper hospital gown. The nearly translucent stuff didn’t absorb blood or fluids, but let them run off like water on a tarp, and the long layered strips swirled together and then parted to give awful glimpses of Matt’s figure underneath. Bandaged. Stitched. His legs and feet were bare. He was clutching the edge of the robes in both fists, pulling it down to try and cover more of his thighs, and his fingers were bright scarlet with fresh blood.

“Takashi,” he said, his voice trembling, “I don’t. I don’t feel so good.” 

He couldn’t look at them. He staggered back, turning away; he couldn’t bear to meet their eyes, he couldn’t bear to see if Keith was standing with them, staring accusingly. He didn’t look back even as footsteps approached; not the quiet noises of bare feet, but the ringing steps of armored boots. He knew who it was. Allura’s voice rang out, coldly furious.

“You left them there. You lured my paladins into Zarkon’s grasp and you _left them there,_ and you lied to me, Shiro.” 

“I didn’t,” he gasped out. “I didn’t, I wouldn’t, I-- I don’t remember, I can’t remember, _I can’t remember._ ”

But the bayard lodged in his side vanished, merciless, and he felt the sudden gush of warmth from its absence. Dizziness rolled over him almost instantly. His knees buckled, and he pitched forward onto the hard, unforgiving floor like a landed fish, gulping for air as his vision dimmed and tunneled.

There was a flower growing in the floor. He stared at it dully, inches away from his face where he’d fallen. It was small and dusty, and it had somehow punched up through the Altean steel, crumpling it like a tree root pushing through concrete. It made him think of small resilient things refusing to accept their circumstances, spiky and stubborn. He twitched his human fingers closed around it, feeling the thorns bite deep.

The radio in his helmet clicked. 

_There you are,_ it said, staticky and distorted. _It’s not real, Shiro. Whatever you see, it’s not real. Wake up. Open your eyes, come on._

He didn’t want to, but he opened his eyes.

He was in the desert at night. The moon through the smudged, grimy window was enormous, cool silver light filtering through the dirty windowpane and the ragged curtains. The shack was small and rickety, its corners and angles just suggestions of shadow, but he was curled on the sofa in the living room and he was safe here. His flesh hand lay in front of his face, and he flexed his untouched, unbloodied fingers gently. There was an ancient, patched blanket covering him, soft from a thousand washings, and it was comforting against his bare skin. He wasn’t wearing anything underneath it, but that was okay. Keith had taken that prisoner uniform and burned it for him without having to be asked.

The blanket smelled like Keith. The pillow smelled like Keith. He buried his face into it and inhaled, letting the scent settle into his lungs, pretending it could spread through him like a drug and bring him back to calm. The furious beating of his heart slowly, slowly went back to normal, and the phantom ache in his side eased. Nothing was hunting him here. No one was here to accuse him. 

He was alone. 

No, not alone; he could hear breathing coming from beyond the front door of the shack, as if something was waiting for him on the porch. It sounded harsh, bestial. He didn’t want to see what kind of creature sounded like that. He curled further into the blanket, trying to ignore it. Nothing outside the threshold could come inside. He had to open the door to let them in.

The little white cat with mismatched eyes lay curled in the corner, watching him. The cat wasn’t part of the shack memory, or part of his time at Garrison, or from anything in particular. The cat was just there, and he tried not to acknowledge it. There was something ominous about the jaunty little bell and bow it wore on its collar, which was not a collar at all but a collection of tiny braided chains. Its blue eye was cold, and its sodium yellow eye sardonic and mocking. It lay with its chin resting on its paws, watching him. Waiting to see what he would do.

In his time trapped here, when he could remember that he was trapped here, he’d learned a lot about ignoring things that only became dangerous if he gave them his attention. He shut his eyes and tried to lose himself in the memory, pulling the sensations of it up around him like a blanket. How lumpy the couch had been. How cool the desert air at night had been. How he’d felt taking a hot shower for the first time in what felt like months, and walking out, naked and clean, to find real towels waiting for him in the tiny, run-down bathroom with its cracked mirror and creaky fan. His bare feet against a floor that wasn’t metal. Real pillows, feather-filled and slightly flat from over-use, that still smelled like Keith. A place on the couch where one body had sat frequently and depressed the springs enough to make it sag in that spot. He remembered the excited chatter of the others, pouring over the maps and graphs spread out on the table, and the worried glances they shot him when they thought he wasn’t looking. His first meal back on Earth had been instant noodles and flat soda on an ancient folding TV tray that might have predated the shack itself. 

He could almost hear the others now, Lance and Pidge trying to have a quiet argument in the kitchen while Keith tried to find something in the closet that would fit Shiro’s altered body. Hunk was still asleep in the tiny bedroom, the door cracked open, and actually Shiro _could_ hear him snoring. He could hear Keith in the closet on the other side of the paper thin wall, pushing hangers aside and going through cardboard boxes. Lance was saying something about trauma and memories. 

“If he doesn’t remember, it’s for a reason, right?” Lance said, his voice muffled behind the cracked and peeling wall. “You can’t just yell at him and try to force him. People make themselves forget things because they can’t handle what happened.”

Shiro’s hand crept to his side, reflexive. The skin there was whole. It didn’t hurt, it didn’t even ache.

The radio on the table clicked quietly. 

It was the same one that had been outside earlier, a mass of exposed wires and old, dusty circuits. It was so dirty that living plants were poking out of the gaps in its exterior, little curling green vines. There was no way it could work. It looked like someone had dropped it from a great height and smashed it to pieces, and then tried to put it back together blindfolded. Hunk would’ve been upset; it looked like an antique. 

He pushed himself up from the couch unhappily, pulling the blanket around his bare shoulders like a cloak. He had made it to this place of safety, and he wanted to rest and remember in peace. He had dealt with enough ghosts already. Lance and Pidge were still murmuring in the background, and Keith thumped a box to the ground in the closet. He thought about standing up despite his tiredness, about going into the bedroom to help. They would be going into the mountains later to search for the Voltron weapon. He would need his strength. 

The radio clicked again. Chiding, if a broken hunk of plastic and wiring could be chiding.

“I don’t know how to use this,” he said out loud as he picked up the clunky, ancient headphones, hearing the hint of resentment in his own voice. He was exhausted. All he wanted to do was sleep.

 _Don’t go back to sleep,_ he heard through the headphones, crackling with static, and nearly dropped them.

They were so old he didn’t want to try putting them on his head in case they snapped in half. He held one side up to his ear warily instead, and use his free hand to twist and fiddle with the dials on the body of the radio. There was no resistance, the dials and gauges were cracked and dusty and clearly broken. 

“Hello?” 

Nothing.

“Hello?”

“Shiro,” a voice breathed in his ear, not through the headphones but real, standing next to him, and this time he did drop them, the plastic cracking and splintering. 

“Don’t worry about that,” the voice said, impatient. He recognized it. He could hear it in stereo; Pidge’s voice in the kitchen, still talking to Lance, and again in the thin air next to his ear. 

“Pidge?” 

“We don’t have much time,” she said. “You have to get up. You have to leave.”

That was ridiculous. He needed to stay. They were going into the mountains later. They were going to search for the Voltron weapon.

“You were already in the mountains, remember? You were climbing alone.”

He shook his head. He hadn’t said any of that aloud.

“Shiro! Just trust me! You have to get up and open the door.”

“There’s something outside,” he managed. “There’s something-- I shouldn’t go outside.” 

“You have to. Please, you have to. It’s harder for me to find you every time, you have to get out of there.”

He was standing up now, although he didn’t remember doing so. He was wearing his regular clothes. There were still muted noises in the background, but they sounded distorted, and the walls of the shack looked strangely insubstantial now. He could see starlight through the roof, and mountains in the distance. He looked back, the little white cat was sitting on the table by the broken radio, staring at him. Shiro edged away from its gaze, his hand groping for the knob of the screen door. He was in the kitchen now, and it was empty, even though he could still hear Lance and Pidge’s faint voices. He could smell that living green scent again, leaves and loam and sunlight.

“Keep going, Shiro. You can do it.” 

“Keith,” he said suddenly, halting. Keith was in the bedroom. Keith was behind him, somewhere. He couldn’t go without saying something. 

“Keith isn’t there,” Pidge’s voice said, trembling with some emotion, and then she barked at him, sharp and demanding. “He’s out here, and he needs you. We all need you, and you need to get out here _right now.”_

The screen door banged open. He heard what sounded like thunder in the distance, and something snarling close by him, but there was nothing but darkness outside the doorframe and a sucking, cold wind, pulling at him like the vacuum of space. He fell through, and found himself no longer in the desert at night.

He was on a Galra ship.

It wasn’t the prison ship of his memories, that much he recognized immediately. The hallways were longer and taller, the decorations more ornate. He was standing near a railing that looked out over a huge open and he could see the lights trailing down for at least a dozen decks. Drones and soldiers looked like insects on the opposite hallway, not moving in patrol formations but in ones and twos. There were others, too, dressed in uniforms but not in armor, and some figures dressed in outlandish costumes that didn’t look like Galra at all.

This was the Dreadnought, the flagship of the Imperial Fleet. 

It looked real. It felt real, but then so had the desert shack, and the clean room, and the cave in the mountains. He was aware of himself, or thought he was. It felt like he was awake. He put his hand on the wall and it took his weight, although there was a faint, strange glow around the outline of his hand that reminded him of the handprint on the canyon face. 

“Pidge,” he whispered, but there was no answer from the air around him. He realized now how easily this might have been a trap, chasing ghostly voices that he couldn’t see through doors that led to nowhere. The shack had been safety for him. The shack had been a place to hide.

Footsteps were approaching. Heavy armored footsteps, a group of drones. He wheeled, looking for a door or a branch off of the hallway, and hissed as he saw the little white cat sitting directly in his path. It yawned at him, the bell jingling faintly, and then deliberately looked to the side at a narrow door, a service door into a utility corridor. 

He chanced it. He darted for the door just seconds ahead of a patrol, hearing the oncoming tromp tromp tromp of their march as the service door slid closed behind him. The new hallway was narrow and more utilitarian, exposed pipes and consoles, but empty as far as he could see. He moved down it swiftly, stepping as lightly as he could. He needed a map of the ship, he needed a route to the hangars. He needed to figure out what the hell was going on, why he wasn’t in armor, whether he was alone on the ship or if the others were really here, waiting for him. The last time he’d seen them…

He couldn’t remember. There were too many battles that blurred together, too many close calls. He slapped his false hand down on a console in a sheltered alcove, scanning the rows of letters as it activated for him, but he couldn’t read Galra writing well enough to make out the date. He hunted for the ship’s schematics instead, feeling his heart sink at the sheer aggressive size of it. Miraculously he was near the launch bays, and they were large enough to host multiple squadrons of snubfighters in each one. Or he could try for an escape pod instead, or a shuttle, but a snubfighter would give him better odds if he could only manage to steal one undetected. 

Some of the closest hangars seemed to be curiously empty, devoid of the lines of red symbols that indicated snubfighter bays. They were colored, indicating that they were occupied, but he couldn’t tell what they were holding. Perhaps larger cruisers, big enough to need the entire space for individual ships. Places to avoid, certainly, they’d be crawling with guards and personnel, but there seemed to be five of them--

No, six. And a section, a huge section that was off-limits, marked with Galra runes for danger. He stared at it. Even the Druid labs hadn’t been so large, nor the quintessence baths, which he remembered vaguely as being deep within the bowels of the ship. 

Grimly he pulled up the search functions, tapping the words in and setting them to run simultaneously. Riva. Chele. Halix. Nial. Satiel. The Galra words for ruby, sapphire, gold, emerald, onyx. Scripts ran across the screen, flashing the words wherever they appeared. 

_Yirael,_ read the text that floated up unbidden under his fingers. It wasn’t a Galra word for a color or a gemstone. It was, if he remembered correctly, something to do with stars and portents, like a bad omen. 

It appeared over the largest off-limits section, and one by one, so did the other terms around it, lighting up the empty launch bays. The icy feeling in his chest crystallized. Zarkon had the lions. Zarkon had all of the lions, and Shiro was the only one free and wandering loose on his flagship, and he couldn’t remember, he didn’t know how he’d gotten here. It was almost impossible for him to be here. 

_Shiro,_ someone whispered, so faint it might have not been real. 

There was a lift door at the end of the hallway. It would take him down directly to the nearest hangar. He thought he heard the jingling of the little white cat and its bell, but when he looked up, he saw nothing.

He took the elevator down. He stepped out of it. No alarms rang. There was a series of security doors ahead of him, at least a dozen, and as he approached they all slid open, one by one, their lights flickering to life to illuminate the passage. They reminded him irresistibly of the lights in the Castle of Lions, guiding their steps. 

The lack of his Paladin armor made him feel horribly exposed, and he had no sense of Black’s steady presence in the back of his mind, or any of the others, which scared him more than he wanted to admit. He didn’t know if this was really happening to him. He didn’t know if he’d been dreaming those memories of Earth, of Pidge’s voice in his ear yelling at him to wake up.

The last door slid open. 

For a moment, he thought he was back in the astral plane, caught in another of its transitory fake landscapes; the ground the stretched out before him was bright green, lush with vegetation, and the sky overhead was a brilliant, cloudless blue. He was looking at a high bluff overlooking the ocean, and he could hear birds crying in the distance, and the sounds of lapping water. A white columned rotunda was set at the top of the bluff, with a staircase of white marble leading up to it. 

He took a step back instinctively, but no; he could see the exact place where the metal hallway ended and the grass began, and there was a shimmery, fuzzy quality to it. Just a hologram. Illusion, but one that played by rules and wouldn’t throw giant monsters or burning ships at him out of nowhere. 

It felt like something out of a fairy tale, walking up the marble steps. Flowers bloomed and waved in a real breeze, and seabirds wheeled overhead, calling to each other. There was a palpable warmth from the brilliant sun overhead, and all of it was artificial. The flowers had no scents. He couldn’t smell any salt from the ocean. Petals drifted onto his clothes and disappeared like snowflakes, fizzling out as they made contact with anything that wasn’t more of the hologram. The ceiling of the chamber had to be enormous to conceal its edges. The rotunda itself was also larger than he’d first thought, the smooth marble was wide enough to have landed a shuttle on, if not one of the lions.

A woman sat in the middle of the rotunda. She had long, wheat gold hair tied back in a messy ponytail, and wore high-belted robes of cascading white and green, the colors startlingly bright against her skin. Her arms were bare, and marked with what looked like scars from spark burns. She sat facing away from him, nearly engulfed by a throne of wires and machinery that hooked into half a dozen equipment piles surrounding her. Holographic viewscreens ran streams of alien symbols across them, and several floating pyramid drones floated around her like attendants, trailing long mechanical arms like streamers. She wore a crown of steel spikes and glowing crystals and snarls of wires; not a crown at all, he realized, but some kind of elaborate mechanical headset.

She was also heavily, unmistakably pregnant. Her shoulders were small and muscular, her frame seeming too thin for the weight she was carrying. Her breasts strained under the thin fabric of the robes, swollen and full with milk. Her clothes had to have been expensive but he could see places where the robes were ripped and oil-stained, fraying threads caught on metal edges. A holographic multi-tool gauntlet covered nearly the length of her left forearm. Her eyes were closed as he approached, her features set in concentration, and he could see her lips moving silently.

_Shiro._

“Pidge,” he said softly, helplessly. She didn’t seem to hear him. She was older than he remembered seeing her last, taller, the youthful roundness of her features sapped by her pregnancy. She was pouring energy into the lives she was carrying, and also into the equipment that she’d wired herself into. The mechanical crown was some kind of modified version of the Altean mind-meld machine they’d all worn during training, and the equipment was-- scanning, somehow, like a radio searching for the proper frequency. She was looking for him. 

In front of her, laid out on a thin blanket over the marble, chest rising and falling regularly under the mass of wires connected to another headset, was a still, sleeping figure. Young, but several years older than him, male, heavily muscled, dressed in a brief gray and black chiton. Collared like a slave. Both of the man’s arms had been replaced up to the shoulder with gleaming silver and black steel, and there were metal ports set into his skin along his neck and spine.

It was himself.

*

**Author's Note:**

> Come yell at me on twitter @BrigFranke, plurk @HaneShinohara, or tumblr at llamrei and brigwrites!


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